[Tex/LaTex] Managing the set of files to be opened when WinEdt starts

winedt

My old laptop died, and I need to rebuild my TeX-system. The new setup:

Windows 10,
MikTeX 2.9,
WinEdt10.2

In my old system I somehow managed to make WinEdt behave in the following IMHO desirable way. May be not your preferences, but this leads to an ideal workflow for me:

  1. When I click a .TeX file, WinEdt opens it and starts with no other previously opened files (those are a pain in the hindquarters if you ask me, because the list just keeps growing…)
  2. When I click a .prj file it opens the master file and the other files I have specifically added to that project (by creating them when the project is open). And no other files.

The trouble is that I don't have a clue how I managed it last time. I asked a lot of people (even the friendly people at WinEdt), and somehow I managed. (You guessed, those config files are only on the hard drive of the dead laptop.) What I thought was sensible guessing was not enough 🙂

I just ran the WinEdt Configuration Wizard, and now it works somehow (.tex and .prj filetypes are associated to WinEdt). But the above problems persist because I really don't know which options manage this behavior and the FAQ is mostly Greek to me. Problems:

  • When I click the icon of a project file, say, LectureNotes.prj, it also opens the irrelevant *.prj file rather than the LaTeX-source files as I expected/wanted.

  • If I follow the instructions here, and include the lines

    [PROJECT_MANAGER*]

    RESTORE_OPENED_FILES=0

then what happens is that only the .prj file is opened. Not even the master file is anywhere to be seen.

  • Suspecting that something with .prj -files had changed since WinEdt7 I recreated the project by setting a master file, and the help files (chapter1.tex, chapter2.tex etc). Saved it as a project. No cigar! This time the .prj file also had lines with name of other recently opened filed (such as HomeworkWk1.tex) unrelated to the lecture notes project!

How do I achieve this? Is there a WinEdt-options for dummies somewhere in the interwebs 🙂

A problem a user like me has with WinEdt is that it tries to do so much. I probably only ever use a tiny fraction of the menu items, and it kinda overwhelms my feeble brain. I do realize that not everybody wants to just use tex->dvi->ps->pdf flow with only good ole LaTeX, so no problem there. It is just me.

When these problems are solved (I'm confident that some friendly person her knows how to), I will start worrying about character sets of files. Last time when I ported source made in Windows XP into Windows 7 I had serious difficulties getting with the different character sets (ASCII, UTF-8, whatnot), IIRC some of those issues were never fully solved, and I need to do strange things to get scandic letters "äöåÄÖÅ" to show correctly. Wish me luck! If I run into problems I will ask 🙂

Edit: I tried tinkering in the Options Interface. No light bulbs for me :-(.
More annoyingly, as a consequence of my tinkering some data about the ini-files were tagged into the .prj-file. WTF. Why should a prj-file have any information not related to the TeX-files of the project??

Edit(2): I asked Alex@winedt.com. Their diagnosis was that something had went wrong when I tried to run the Configuration Wizard. I think I ran with admin privileges, but I tried it again, and this time I added, as per Alex's instructions, "-V " in the command switch box. This cured the problem with prj-files as well as the problem of opening previous files.

Alex further adviced

  • against changing the default

    RESTORE_OPENED_FILES=1

    for this purpose, and recommended using the command switch "-V ".
    Arzigoglu's answer gave the same suggestion so I accepted that to let
    this thread drift into the background. I couldn't figure out how to
    do that change with regedit, but I guess running the configuration
    wizard with admin privileges amounted to the same.

  • not to open any ini-files while working with a project. Close the project first, and then tinker. That way those files won't leave any marks in the prj-file.

Best Answer

Try this.

  1. Open the Windows registry editor (Win+R -> regedit).

  2. On the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT find the WinEdt.TeX key.

  3. Go to subkey WinEdt.tex\shell\open\command

  4. On the predefined value, change something like

    "C:\Program Files\WinEdt Team\WinEdt 10\WinEdt.exe" "%1"

    to

    "C:\Program Files\WinEdt Team\WinEdt 10\WinEdt.exe" -V "%1"

    (note the addition of -V switch)

That should be enough to achieve what you want.

Note that the right registry key might be HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\WinEdt.TeX if you don't have admin privileges.

Source: WinEdt manual index -> Command Line Switches

-V

Starts WinEdt in "Virgin Mode": the last project is not automatically opened and no files are immediately restored.

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