I have been looking into LaTeX (pronounced La Tek) editors for my writing now and after a lot of trials and tribulations, I finally settled on LateXila.

Not only does it look identical to my favourite text editor / IDE of all time - gEdit. It supports syntax highlighting, decent support for BibTex referencing. It also has a very user friendly interface and it’s also customizable as per any GTK interface in GNOME.

I have not checked if there are versions for other Operating Systems but I am pretty certain anyone wishing to try this out with any Linux distribution can do it with the built in package/software manager, shipped with it.

This is obviously not to say the others do not have advantages over LaTeXila, this is just the one I have felt most at home with. I have tried the LaTex plug-in for gEdit, that is also quite good especially the support you get when using the \cite command, it handily provides a drop down of keys available in any BibTeX files you have referenced in that LaTeX doument. I haven’t played with LaTeXila’s preferences extensively so I am not sure if it has that too.

You can find sourceforge page here http://latexila.sourceforge.net/