Ask HN: What LaTeX editor do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What LaTeX editor do you use?

24 pointsiNic44 comments

I am a Mac user who has been annoyed by the most recent TexPad -> Texifier update and is looking to switch - any recommendations?

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I made good experiences with VScode + LaTeX Workshop extension. Here is an example project that should be fully set up.

https://github.com/uibk-dps-teaching/DPS-LaTeX

However, I also do want to state that I ditched LaTeX completely by now since there is just too much headache involved. I am sticking with Markdown and HTML+CSS for the most part; weasyprint is really helpful when I have to generate PDFs.

The only thing I miss about the vscode setup is support for a decent PDF viewer (not sumatra), and that magnifier loupe thing that other editors have.

This is unorthodox, but I use https://www.overleaf.com/ its a neat online editor where I can have my docs stored on the cloud and it has a PDF preview on the side, and you can compile it at the end.

Overleaf is great, I use a self hosted instance with my company. Only downside to self hosting is that the git integration does not work

While it is not advertised much on their own site Overleaf is AGPL3 licensed and is mostly open source: https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

I use TeXstudio [1], which is really good with tables, and supports macros which tremendously help speed up the writing process.

When writing for group projects, we use Overleaf [2]. Its Git feature also makes it possible to write locally in TeXstudio and then push the changes to Overleaf.

[1] https://www.texstudio.org/

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/

Emacs with various -TeX modes, mainly in Doom Emacs with the latex flag.

Standard emacs with Auctex for me.

Emacs with auctex, cdlatex, pdf-view and always two frames. C-c C-a is super useful. Also pdf-view-auto-crop-mode.

cdlatex and in-buffer previews with (org-latex-preview) are great too when not writing in a .tex file.

This is how I originally got into using Emacs. As the best environment for LaTeX (via AUCTeX).

My colleagues always used LyX[1], which put me off in the beginning as it looks quite old-fashioned but it's actually a really powerful editor.

1: https://www.lyx.org/

I would say the killer feature of LyX (how to pronounce that, Luke?)

is the almost “instantaneous” quasi-WYSIWYG.

Wish there was something more hacker friendly (and hacker cred bestowing) that does instant, actual WYSIWYG.

I'm using TeXworks, bundled in MiKTeX.

It has a compile button and syncing, that's all I want for a LaTeX editor.

Seconding this, I'm using the same and it just works.

I have made Good experiences with TeXShop on Mac:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeXShop

https://github.com/dandavison/xenops

I’m also the author of it. It’s an emacs mode that automatically renders mathematical content as you type and displays it inline in the buffer as SVGs which render crisply on high resolution screens. It doesn’t handle all the different math delimiters yet.

Slightly surprised nobody has mentioned org-mode under Emacs. It’s a slightly orthogonal use-case, not strictly editing native LaTeX. But it does a million things well, especially organizing documents of various lengths, and then exports very nice LaTeX. Not just that you could subsequently tweak, but allowing includion of arbitrary LaTeX that also gets exported.

For many use-cases it can be much more efficient to step back and let the LaTeX get written for you.

Overleaf does everything what i need and it works so frictionless that I haven't installed latex locally for years now.

I used it for both, my bachelor and master thesis as well as some other bigger projects.

But at some point you have to pay! (number of projects, features, not sure of exact conditions).

Or host your own

You can get a free premium account by linking your IEEE collabratec account to overleaf. This works even without an IEEE membership.

TeXStudio which is a nice active fork of TeXMaker

Overleaf. It makes it so easy to get started with LaTex, and it's easy to let others given feedback on your work.

I use overleaf these days mostly because overleaf makes it effortless to work across multiple machines.

I still have my neovim + texlab [1] setup just in case though.

[1]: https://github.com/latex-lsp/texlab

You can even host your own overleaf instance, I used to be on vscodium + latex workshop like another commented, but hosting my own overleaf instance has made me more mobile and collaboration is a ton easier now

Vim, but I gave up writing LaTeX after college. I just write orgmode markup (still in Vim) that exports to LaTeX subfiles. There is still the single main LaTeX document, but it is mostly packages and settings.

I've been using Texmaker for the past 10 years for the few occasions I need to edit some LaTeX file. My needs are really basic so I'm not sure if I'm missing something compared to other editors.

Vim

vim + vim-latex ;-)

Texmaker: https://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

TeXworks on Windows/Linux, TeXshop on Mac OS X.

TeXMaker in the past, but I might now be inclined to use Sublime Text, especially if I could sort out completions.

Jupyter notebooks, surprisingly. I prefer the mix of markdown and LaTeX together. Way faster to just write and go.

I like composing the TeX markup in VSCode and MikTex for generating the PDFs.

Emacs.

Emacs with *tex-mode(s)

TeXShop on Mac, Spacenvim or evil-mode Doom emacs on Linux.

plain old vim on both macOS and Linux

Personally i just use doom emacs

Emacs in fundamental-mode.

Vim and vim-latex.

Emacs.

vim

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