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Comment by setopt | Hacker News Reader

The best feature of Overleaf is that you can `git clone` projects and work on them locally (if you have premium). That way, you yourself can use e.g. Emacs to edit, your collaborators can use Overleaf in a browser if they wish, and it all syncs nicely.

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Sounds great in principle. In practice, it's the stuff of nightmares. This is because the web version commits every keystroke of your online contributors, making it very difficult for you to actually merge your local commits (they need to stop typing!).

Yup. When I was using it, I don't think it was literally every keystroke but it was something pretty granular so that if your contributors were working on the document it was a nightmare to get anything pushed since it kept changing under your feet and causing conflicts. Finish a merge, and another one is waiting.

I was just about to comment something like: worked fine for me... But then I realised that the only time I did this I was 6+ timezones away from my collaborators.

I actually never experienced this issue, that sounds annoying. But most papers I work on have like 2 coauthors, where one of them is usually in a different time zone, so that might be why :)

In my recent experience, it only seemed to make a commit when you did a `git pull`.

To somewhat echo other comments here: users need to be very careful with the git syncing. It works most of the time when edits on git clones and edits on the web interface are being made at very separate times, and when nothing at all is done in git other than committing, pulling, and pushing (if I recall, even signing can break it). But amongst the people I know who have used Overleaf for important projects with collaborators, the git syncing has generally worked reasonably right up until it is needed the most: important, tricky changes; multiple authors meeting online and editing; oncoming deadlines for conference paper submissions resulting in many edits over a short time scale. In critical situations, it can often become unusably slow (potentially tens of minutes, to hours, to get a successful pull or push), or simply fail.

One group with a paid, group subscription asked support about the instability, and was simply told their use case was unusual (writing conference papers with some git and some web editors?). They are now planning on moving away from using it.

I actually didn't know that! I do have premium through my school so I will definitely try that out.

That said, I actually don't think the integrated Overleaf editor is bad. They have Vim keystroke support, so I can fairly easily use it without much trouble on my end.

The online editor is OK, I also use it (with Vim keybindings) sometimes for quick/minor edits.

I’m not comfortable using it for extended work though. I miss things like surround text objects for TeX environments and macros (provided by evil-tex or vimtex), ergonomic entry of equations (provided by CDLaTeX or by the vimtex insert-mode bindings), autoformatting (provided by latexindent), and some navigational abilities (e.g. being able to jump to the documentation of TeX packages with a single keybinding). On top of that, there’s the missing general editor plugins… And at least on MacOS, their PDF viewer is quite blurry compared to the native viewers :)

With that said, I think Overleaf is great, and it’s made LaTeX itself much more accessible for a wider audience. But for me, it pales in comparison to a local Emacs or Vim configuration…

Like a sibling comment mentioned, it sucks for synchronous work with colleagues. Async is fine though.

How often are you working on the same section of a document simultaneously?

Usually right before deadlines.

It definitely happens if you’re writing in the same room with someone. I’ve done this with advisors or other students, not all the time but with enough regularity to make it relevant.

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