Why GitLaTeX

Overleaf is excellent until you want your files on your own disk, your own Git remote, and no upload limits. GitLaTeX gives you the same shape of workflow — editor, live PDF, one-click compile — but everything runs locally against a real Git repository. Your .tex files are just files, and your history is just Git.

• Your files stay yours. Plain folders on your disk, versioned with real Git.
• No account, no subscription, no upload cap.
• Compiles locally, so your unpublished work never leaves your machine.
• One command to start. pip install gitlatex && gitlatex.

The editor itself (Monaco), the icon set and the web fonts are loaded from a CDN, so the interface needs a network connection the first time it is opened on a machine. Everything else — your files, compiling, and Git — is local.

Installation

pip install gitlatex

Requirements

LaTeX and Git are optional if you only want to edit files, but compiling and the Git features need them on your PATH.

Quick start

gitlatex

Your browser opens at http://localhost:5000. Clone a repository or create a local folder, open it, and start writing. Changes save automatically as you type.

Command line options

gitlatex --port 3000 --repos ~/Documents/papers

Features

Editor

Built on Monaco, the editor that powers VS Code.

• LaTeX and BibTeX syntax highlighting with themes tuned for both — commands, environment names, math delimiters, labels and citation keys each get their own colour, in light and dark.
• Autocomplete for 150+ LaTeX commands and 50+ environments. Inside \ref{} and \cite{} it completes from your project's actual labels and .bib keys, showing the title, author and year of each entry as you pick.
• BibTeX IntelliSense — entry types after @, and field names inside an entry.
• Document outline of every chapter, section and subsection, tracking your cursor and jumping you anywhere in the file with a click.
• Matched \begin/\end colouring so nested environments are obvious at a glance, and you can see immediately when one is left unclosed.
• Autosave — edits are written to disk shortly after you stop typing.

Spell checking

• Unknown words in .tex, .txt and .md are underlined as you type.
• LaTeX-aware: comments, math ($...$, equation, align, …), verbatim blocks, and the arguments of \ref, \cite, \url, \includegraphics and friends are all skipped, so you only get flagged on actual prose.
• Built for papers: prefixed and hyphenated coinages (nanowire, ferromagnets, anti-symmetric) resolve against their parts instead of being flagged, and US spellings the base dictionary omits are included.
• Fix from the lightbulb or Ctrl+., or add a word to your personal dictionary — it persists across projects and sessions.

Compiling

• One click to PDF, with the result shown in a pane beside the editor.
• Full multi-pass builds — the engine runs, biber or bibtex runs when your document needs it, then the engine reruns until cross-references and citations settle. No more compiling three times by hand to clear ??.
• Choose your engine: pdflatex, xelatex or lualatex.
• A real problems list. Errors and warnings are parsed out of the LaTeX log into a clickable list — click one to jump straight to the line, with squiggles in the editor to match.
• Pick the main file when your project has more than one .tex, so compiling a chapter always builds the root document.

Git and version history

• Status, diff, pull and push from the toolbar. Push stages everything, commits with a timestamp, and pushes in one action.
• Pull and push enable themselves only when there is something to do, with ahead/behind counts read from the remote.
• Version history panel listing your commits, with the files each one touched and per-file insertion/deletion counts.
• Side-by-side diffs for any file in any commit, for your uncommitted working tree, or between any two commits you select.

Settings

• Light and dark themes, applied to the whole app and the editor together.
• Spell check on or off.
• Remote Compiler API — point GitLaTeX at a web service that compiles LaTeX and it will build there instead of locally, so you do not need a TeX distribution installed at all. The app ships with full documentation for building one at Settings → Compiler API.
• Tells you when a newer GitLaTeX is on PyPI.

Workflow

1. Run gitlatex.
2. Add a project — clone from a Git URL, or create a local folder.
3. Open it and edit. The file tree supports creating, renaming, moving (drag and drop), deleting and uploading.
4. Compile to build the PDF and see any problems.
5. Push when you are ready.

Projects live in ./repos unless you pass --repos.

Troubleshooting

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Run from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/abdussamiakanda/gitlatex.git
cd gitlatex
pip install -e .
gitlatex

There is no build step. The browser loads the ES modules directly, so editing a file and reloading the page is the entire feedback loop.

Project layout

The code is split by area, so a change usually touches one small file.

Server (gitlatex/) — two layers: services/ holds the logic and knows nothing about HTTP, routes/ holds thin blueprints that parse a request, call a service and return JSON. That is why services/spell.py and routes/spell.py both exist: the first is the spell checker, the second is the four endpoints in front of it.

To add an endpoint: put the logic in services/, then a short handler in the matching routes/*.py. routes/pages.py registers last, because its catch-all serves index.html for unknown paths.

Front end (gitlatex/public/)

Three conventions worth knowing:

• Shared state lives on the single state object in js/core/state.js. Anything only one module cares about stays local to that module.
• Buttons opt in with data-action="name" in the markup plus an entry in the ACTIONS map in app.js. One delegated listener dispatches them all, so a new button needs no id and no new listener.
• Loading states come from js/ui/loading.js — showSkeleton for lists, setPaneLoading for panes, setButtonLoading for actions. Use these rather than inventing a fourth pattern.

Credits

Built and maintained by Md Abdus Sami Akanda and Md Atiqur Rahman.

If GitLaTeX saves you some time, you can keep the coffee flowing.

License

Released under the ISC License.