TeXShop

Sixteenth Anniversary

TeXShop was released on July 23, 2000. I know that because Max Horn has been collecting and archiving TeXShop source code folders. He encouraged me to turn on machines that had not run for ten years, so now Horn has almost the entire run of sources for the program.

At the release, macOS was still in beta; it was released on March 24, 2001. Before that, Apple's PDF code had an important bug. It could not access embedded fonts in a document. So originally TeXShop could only display files written in Times Roman, and without mathematical symbols. To get around this problem, the program had a preference setting to render using Ghostscript rather than Apple software. Rendering was fuzzy but symbols could be seen. When I finally got the release version of macOS a week before the official release, I was thrilled to see that the embedded font bug had been fixed, and I ripped out the Ghostscript rendering preference from TeXShop.

Of course the original version had 32 bit PowerPC code. It still runs on Snow Leopard and below. Recently I recompiled the program for 64 bit Intel code. Surprisingly, the original code compiled without errors, and the running program had only two small glitches:

The command to select a source line by giving its line number failed. This was a 32-64 bit issue, fixed by changing "unsigned" to "UInt".
TeXShop Help failed. In the original macOS, help files were rtf files, but Apple soon switched to html help files. I fixed this by writing a very small new class to display the original rtf file.

The original version and source are available below. To typeset, you must reset the preference settings for the tex and latex programs, since /usr/texbin and /Library/TeX/texbin did not yet exist. Even Gerben's distribution of teTeX did not appear until a few months later.

This program was written in Cocoa. As a result, later improvements in Cocoa automatically apply to it, without code changes. For instance, if you quit the program with a file open and later start again, the file will be reloaded. This was not in the original, but it is present now because the change requires no new code.

The program does not support automatic saving because that feature must be activated. Activation requires just one line of code and would be easy.

On Sierra, the program supports tabs because, well, that change requires no new code.

Here is the original program and source, recompiled for modern 64 bit Intel systems.

Original Version of TeXShop for Lion or higher (136 KB)
Source Code for Original Version (368 KB)
Koch's Version of History (108 KB)