I made a free, local, offline, Typora-like visual and source editor for LaTeX
Hi r/LaTeX
You might know me from the TikZ and Visual LaTeX editor posts I made before.
Anyways, thank you so much to everyone who gave me valuable feedback, especially to the ones who spent their time interviewing with me.
I took the feedback and I made this.
Here are the features:
- Completely local and completely free (it does not require cloud hosting fees)
- Built for LaTeX specifically (rename, references, intellisense, spell check)
- Compile and PDF viewer
- Visual LaTeX editor (edit source or edit visually)
So why? What is the reason, and why should you use this over other visual editors?
- Very minimalist and designed for LaTeX
- Visual editing for tables with cell merging, aligned environments, etc.
- Visual editing for .bib files
- Edit LaTeX directly or visually
- Texpile combines both the Overleaf visual editor philosophy and the LyX philosophy. Texpile's visual editor is way more aggressive than Overleaf's (see the 3rd image for a comparison of 2 of the same document, Overleaf is on right)
- This better visual experience is achieved by using a parser to turn LaTeX code into an AST and making assumptions about macros. For most cases it works extremely well, and on some rough documents it will leave the code it can't analyze as it is.
Okay so a bit about myself.
Around 4 years ago I started Texpile as a fun project, initially named QuickQuill. The original idea was to make it easier for me to take math notes. It was offline, and I found LaTeX perfect for generating export PDFs. Over the next few years I added more features to get it on par with LaTeX features. And as part of my school's startup competition 8 month ago, I made the original offline idea into a SaaS and started posting here. It was only a few months ago that I took another fresh look at this project and realized I made way too much bloat. So here I am, and I hereby promise the desktop version will be local, no subscriptions, and free.
The app is not live yet as I am making a few finishing touches on it. So here I would like to ask you a few questions (since getting code signatured verified is quite a fortune):
Would you use the desktop app?
Is there anything you would like to see in the app?
Would you care if it is open source (licensed under AGPL) vs freeware? There are a lot of issues with open source now with AI agents everywhere.
Linking my GitHub for credibility: https://github.com/nullpointerexceptionkek