VS Code as LaΤeΧ editor

See also scientific_workbooks, VS Code, LaTeX, citation management, text editors, diagrams, markdown.

LaTeX-Workshop is the de facto standard VS Code LaTeX extension. Originally I was not a fan because despite having many features it ended up being confusing when things went wrong. (Where WAS that syntax error?)

The new version is much better; you just need to make sure the little TeX sidebar is active and everything becomes apparent. Some things are still fiddly,but it provides nearly as good a LaTeX preview experience as, say, TeXShop, similar TeX integration and superior text editing, and is worth trying because VS code is a better text editor than those LaTeX programs.

It supposedly can render individual equations (although this does not work for me).

Snippets

It also has smart snippets with autocomplete.

Reproduced here for my offline reference are the most useful ones.

Build recipes

Building using something modern or fancy? The default build workflow is some pdflatex+BibTeX system that is ok but pretty outdated. I would prefer a simpler more modern workflow that supports e.g. XeTeX. It doesn’t support XeTeX or latexmk out of the box. There are two ways to do set this up.

Firstly the old school way that the developers of LaTeX workshop seem to dislike, but which was far and away the easiest for me. Use the Latex Workshop-style TeX magic This looks like, e.g.

% !TEX program = latexmk
% !TEX options = -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -file-line-error -xelatex -outdir="%OUTDIR%" "%DOC%"

You put that at the start of the master document. Good. Also for this to actually be a useful build method, one would want to disable auto-clean (a.k.a. delete everything and rebuild from scratch all the time) so that latexmk can be smart about rebuilds. The price one pays for this is needing to manually clean up the detritus from time to time.

"latex-workshop.latex.autoBuild.cleanAndRetry.enabled": false

The preferred way that is difficult, verbose and and error-prone but somehow ineffably better, is to make new “recipes”, and presumably keep the old ones too? The result is lengthy.

    "latex-workshop.latex.recipes": [
        {
            "name": "latexmk 🔃",
            "tools": [
                "latexmk"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "xelatexmk 🔃",
            "tools": [
                "xelatexmk"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "platexmk 🔃",
            "tools": [
                "platexmk"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "pdflatex ➞ bibtex ➞ pdflatex`×2",
            "tools": [
                "pdflatex",
                "bibtex",
                "pdflatex",
                "pdflatex"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "xelatex ➞ biber ➞ xelatex",
            "tools": [
                "xelatex",
                "biber",
                "xelatex"
            ]
        }
    ],
    "latex-workshop.latex.tools": [
        {
            "name": "latexmk",
            "command": "latexmk",
            "args": [
                "-synctex=1",
                "-interaction=nonstopmode",
                "-file-line-error",
                "-outdir=%OUTDIR%",
                "%DOC%"
            ],
            "env": {}
        },
        {
            "name": "platexmk",
            "command": "latexmk",
            "args": [
                "-synctex=1",
                "-interaction=nonstopmode",
                "-file-line-error",
                "-pdf",
                "-outdir=%OUTDIR%",
                "%DOC%"
            ],
            "env": {}
        },
        {
            "name": "xelatexmk",
            "command": "latexmk",
            "args": [
                "-synctex=1",
                "-interaction=nonstopmode",
                "-file-line-error",
                "-xelatex",
                "-outdir=%OUTDIR%",
                "%DOC%"
            ],
            "env": {}
        },
        {
            "name": "pdflatex",
            "command": "pdflatex",
            "args": [
                "-synctex=1",
                "-interaction=nonstopmode",
                "-file-line-error",
                "%DOC%"
            ],
            "env": {}
        },
        {
            "name": "xelatex",
            "command": "xelatex",
            "args": [
                "-synctex=1",
                "-interaction=nonstopmode",
                "-file-line-error",
                "%DOC%"
            ],
            "env": {}
        },
        {
            "name": "bibtex",
            "command": "bibtex",
            "args": [
                "%DOCFILE%"
            ],
            "env": {}
        },
        {
            "name": "biber",
            "command": "biber",
            "args": [
                "%DOCFILE%"
            ],
            "env": {}
        }
    ]

Having created a useful list of the recipes I need for different documents, I find myself in the tricky circumstance of needing a compact way to invoke them for different documents, and it is not really clear how to do this.

SyncTeX with external viewers

Not officially supported but works for me and very nice for dual monitor setup. A good example of reverse engineering the config for kubuntu’s okular PDF viewer is given by Heiko/@miteron.

{
    "latex-workshop.view.pdf.viewer": "external",
    // @sync host=work-pc
    "latex-workshop.view.pdf.external.viewer.command": "okular",
    "latex-workshop.view.pdf.external.viewer.args": [
            "--unique",
            "%PDF%"
    ],
    // @sync host=work-pc
    "latex-workshop.view.pdf.external.synctex.command": "okular",
    "latex-workshop.view.pdf.external.synctex.args": [
        "--unique",
        "%PDF%#src:%LINE%%TEX%"
    ],
}

For vanilla GNOME evince things are more complicated.

Gotchas

Gotcha: If there are weird “provider errors” in the vscode exthost log, the problem might be that latexindent must be installed.

tlmgr install latexindent

Spell checking

Contra my normal VS Code spell checking advice, SpellRight is unsupported.

If I persist in using spellright, the following exclusions make things tidier:

    "spellright.ignoreRegExpsByClass": {
        "latex": [
            "/\\\\begin\\\\{{equation,align}\\\\}(.*?)\\\\end\\\\{{equation,align}\\\\}/mg",
            "/\\\\{autoref,autocites?,cites?}\\\\{(.*?)\\\\}/g",
        ],
    },

But probably better is to disable spellright for latex file in favour of cspell instead. Supposedly LanguageTool is good for more diverse languages, but I have not tried it.