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Editor

If you're installing a windows version, by default you got a MikTex editor. In Linux, you can combine default editors like gedit and terminal to write and compile the documents. There are dedicated LaTeX editors like Kile is available. However, I would recommend a general purpose editor Visual Studio (VS) Code, mainly because, you can easily integrate with Github as well as can enjoy the additional capabilities with its extensions. Summarizing below the minimal procedure and recommended add-ons for VS code.

Setting-up

  • In windows, VS code can either install from the Microsoft store or by directly downloading the executable from here.
  • For Linux, if you're using Debian or RedHat based distribution, you can download the binaries from the same link above. Alternatively, if you use Flatpak or Snap packages, you can download the corresponding files. For Arch, AUR repositories are also available.
  • In addition, if you do not wish to use the enterprise backed version, there is an open source version, in the name VS Codium. However, you can not use the default settings sync options. Read more about and possible issues here.

Using VS-Code

VS Code has three major interfaces. The left panel contains the shortcuts to the extensions along with file browser. The extension manager is also available here. The right panel is divided into two parts, editor and compiler. Often the compiler is hidden and you can toggle it with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+~

  1. Bookmarks
  2. Code Spell Checker
  3. Git Graph
  4. Github repositories
  5. Latex language support
  6. Path Intellisense
  7. Project Manager
  8. VSCode-PDF

Here I recommend the simple Latex Language Support extension along with the VS Code PDF for the highlighting and view pdf within VS Code Editor. However, there are more better options like Latex Workshop are available. They provide more better features, though I wish to stick with the simpler and straight forward options.