Smart quotes

Latex handles smart quotes like you’d expect it to. If there are single-quotes or double-quotes in the text section of your document, they’ll get turned into left and right quotes in the final PDF.

Spell checking

I just use VIM’s built-in spell-checking feature. Make sure you use it with MacVIm/GVIM, or else it looks terrible. Apparently there’s a way to bring up the correction suggestions list too, if you look for it.

Rich formatting

You can do bold and italics and lists in Latex. I like it even better than the WYSIWYG editors, since you can do line manipulation and fancy macro stuff in VIM too.

Instant feedback

You can mix inotify-tools and your Latex compiler to get you basically instant feedback. Every time you save the file, you can get it to re-compile your Latex and Preview.app will reload it. I’m just sharing my home folder through VirtualBox shared folders (configured in Vagrant), so I can work with files directly on the VM.