Install.md

Installation and basic settings

Requirements

• LaTeX distribution in system PATH. For example, TeX Live.
• Please note MikTeX does not ship with SyncTeX. Please use built-in synctex functionality.
• latexmk is required for the default recipe for building LaTeX projects to work. Alternatively, you can set up your own LaTeX recipe.
• Optional: Install ChkTeX to lint LaTeX projects.
• Optional: Install latexindent.pl for formatting support if it is not provided by your LaTeX distribution.

Installation

Installing LaTeX Workshop is simple. You can find it in Visual Studio Code Marketplace, or simply run ext install latex-workshop in VS Code Quick Open (ctrl/cmd + P).

Setting PATH environment variable

Usually, you do NOT have to set PATH environment variable. TeX distributions appropriately set the variable on your system. And, LaTeX Workshop never touches the variable. If VS Code cannot find executables of TeX, it means that the setting of your system is broken. For the ways of setting environment variables on Windows, see link or link. On macOS and Linux, refer to a document by the rbenv dev team.

If you can not fix the setting of your system, you can also override PATH with the env property of LaTeX recipes.

Usage

The typical usage is to open a .tex file and have a look at the TeX sidebar to access all the extension features

• Building
• Viewing and going from source to PDF back and forth
• Catching errors and warnings
• Navigating in environments
• Navigating the document structure. The section names of LaTeX outline hierarchy are defined in latex-workshop.view.outline.sections. This property is an array of case-sensitive strings in the order of document structure hierarchy. For multiple tags in the same level, separate the tags with | as delimiters, e.g., section|alternative. It is also used by the folding mechanism.
• Miscellaneous actions
  • Open citation browser, see also Intellisense for citations

If you prefer to access some of the most common actions through a right click menu, set latex-workshop.showContextMenu to true. Default is false.

Using Docker

Starting with 1.35.0, VS Code supports Docker with Remote - Containers. LaTeX Workshop works well with the extension. Try the extension at first.

Starting with release 5.3.0, there is an experimental implementation on Docker support following the idea of @Arxisos. You can set latex-workshop.docker.enabled to true to use a docker based LaTeX distribution. The docker image to be used is defined by latex-workshop.docker.image.latex, the default value is tianon/latex. It is advised that the image is 'pre-'pulled.

@Arxisos created snippets for LaTeX binaries in docker, and @lippertmarkus had another short description on how to use Docker with LaTeX Workshop.

Using WSL

Starting with 1.35.0, VS Code supports WSL through Remote - WSL. LaTeX Workshop works well with the extension.