10 Best Free and Open source LaTeX/ TeX editors for macOS
What is LaTeX?
LaTeX is document writing, preparation that uses TeX typesetting for formatting, originally designed by Leslie Lamport in 1983. It is preferred by many scientists and researchers around the world. LaTeX is also considered a TeX macro package with more user-friendly settings.
Who uses LaTeX/ TeX?
Many are using LaTeX under «Academic discipline», yet many professions continue to use LaTeX in their daily workflow, as it help them keep their work organised here is a list of some of them:
- Mathematicians
- Researchers
- Engineers
- Journalists
- Editors
- Publishers
- Writers
- Statisticians
- Chemists
- Data scientists
How does LaTeX look like?
Is LaTeX for everyone?
LaTeX is not for everyone, some may prefer to use simple editor, word processor or note-taking app instead of investing time learning LaTeX/ TeX. However, LaTex is an advanced tool which requires some time to learn and master.
Free & Open source LaTeX/ TeX editors for macOS
1- TeXMaker
TeXMaker is a free open source LaTeX/ TeX editor for almost all known platforms including macOS. It made the top of this list because it’s features-rich, supports RTL, comes with advanced editing tools and project management workflow tools.
TeXMaker supports many languages and it’s perfect for publishers, researchers, editors and engineers.
It comes with a rich library that contains 370 mathematical symbols, a powerful wizard , advanced error handling and a file/ text search tool with advanced options.
2- TeXstudio
TeXstudio is a fork of TeXMaker with more tools and customisation options. It inherits all the features and functionalities of TeXMaker with addition to many other features for writers and researchers. Its library has 1000+ mathematical symbols, easy bookmarks management, drag/ drop support for images, live assistant for images, formulas, tables and code.
It features enhanced autocompletion, code folding, interactive dynamic spellchecker, interactive grammar checker, and reference checker. It also comes with built-in support for LaTeX compilers, bibliography manager, and glossary.
3- LyX
LyX is a word and text document processor which combines LaTex with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. It’s built for creating mathematically-rich and structured documents.
LyX is perfect for writers and publishers as it is good for writing books with built-in features including advanced copy/ paste, drag/ drop support, built-in reference manager and its support for many graphical formats.
4- MacTex
With MacTex you are getting simple yet powerful LaTeX/ TeX editor. It’s built exclusively for macOS, distributed as a lightweight package.
5- TeXShop
TeXShop is yet another free LaTeX/ TeX editor built for macOS. It’s developed and released as an open source by the American mathematician Richard Koch.
6-MikTeX
MikeTeX is a cross-platform LaTeX/ TeX editor which a built-in package manager that allow the user to extend the core functionalities by downloading online packages.
7- Aquamacs
Emacs is an integrated text editors family preferred by many developers, programmers and researchers around the world. It’s originally developed by David A. Moon, Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard M. Stallman.
Though, Emacs is built for GNU Linux, Aquamacs is built for macOS and offers seamless integration with the system. It features better keybinding, drag/ drop functionality and clipboard integration.
Aquamacs has a built-in support for LaTeX/ Tex and a rich ecosystem with many third-party packages.
8- Kile
Kile is an open source free LaTeX/ Tex editor for KDE Desktop environment (Linux), but it also runs on macOS and Linux.
Kile features template and wizard manager, smart build system for LaTeX document, advanced editing commands, auto-completion of (La)TeX commands, quick preview and a powerful easy-to-use compiler.
9- TeXnicle
TeXnicle is a free LaTeX/ TeX editor and project manager. It’s lightweight native macOS package. It features project management tool, document outline viewer, built-in code library and autocompletion.
10- Vim with LaTeX suite
If you are Vim user i would recommend using Vim with LaTeX suite. LaTeX suite for vim combines Vim with LaTeX power making it rich productive for experienced Vim users
Conclusion
LaTeX/ TeX is not for everyone, it’s for specific type of users who don’t mind investing some time learning and mastering this productive typesetting. With this article I hoped to make it easy for macOS users to have many options to choose from.
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Getting LaTeX
LaTeX is free software under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL). LaTeX is distributed through CTAN servers or comes as part of many easily installable and usable TeX distributions provided by the TeX User Group (TUG) or third parties. If you run into trouble, visit the help section.
LaTeX is not a stand-alone typesetting program in itself, but document preparation software that runs on top of Donald E. Knuth’s TeX typesetting system. TeX distributions usually bundle together all the parts needed for a working TeX system and they generally add to this both configuration and maintenance utilities. Nowadays LaTeX, and many of the packages built on it, form an important component of any major TeX distribution.
The LaTeX team cannot guarantee that TeX distributions, even recent ones, contain the most recent version of LaTeX. It may happen that you need a more recent LaTeX than the one that your favourite TeX distribution carries, e.g., in order to get a particular bug fix. In that case you will need to fetch LaTeX from CTAN and install it on top of your distribution. See below for details.
TeX Distributions
If you’re new to TeX and LaTeX or just want an easy installation, get a full TeX distribution. The TeX Users Group (TUG) has a list of notable distributions that are entirely, or least primarily, free software.
Linux
Check your Linux distributions software source for a TeX distribution including LaTeX. You can also install the current TeX Live distribution directly—in fact this may be advisable as many Linux distributions only contain older versions of TeX Live, see Linux TeX Live package status for details.
Mac OS
The MacTeX distribution contains everything you need, including a complete TeX system with LaTeX itself and editors to write documents.
Windows
Check out the MiKTeX or proTeXt or TeX Live distributions; they contain a complete TeX system with LaTeX itself and editors to write documents.
Online
LaTeX online services like Papeeria, Overleaf, ShareLaTeX, Datazar, and LaTeX base offer the ability to edit, view and download LaTeX files and resulting PDFs.
You can obtain LaTeX from CTAN , which is the primary source of distribution for LaTeX. In order for your downloaded LaTeX to be of any use, you have to obtain and set up a TeX system first. You can either install a TeX distribution (see above) or get a TeX system from CTAN . If you use a TeX distribution then it will include a version of LaTeX so this will probably make things easier for you; but you may have a reason not to do this.
The LaTeX Git Repository
These days the LaTeX development sources are kept in a GitHub repository (previously we used SVN).
Anyone can access it and download the files, but submission is restricted to team members. The repository is located at https://github.com/latex3/latex2e and from that browser page you may explore the files, clone the repository or download the files in a .zip archive (roughly 25Mb) by using the appropriate buttons.
If you are familiar with Git you can also clone the repository using the command line or your favorite Git fontend tool, e.g.,
which needs about 50Mb of space. Alternatively, you can do a Subversion checkout from the command line, e.g.,
which will just checkout the current files. But be aware that a SVN checkout of the form
will download all files including their history (back to 2009) and amounts to roughly 1.4Gb so that is quite large.
Note: If you had bookmarked the old SVN repository please update that bookmark to the new GIT repository as we have finally removed it.
A note on Git pull requests
Git repositories support distributed development and allow people to provide change sets that are made available through so called pull requests, so that the maintainers of a program can “pull the suggested changes” into the main repository.
While we appreciate contributions, we think that for the core LaTeX software pull requests are usually not a good approach (unless the change has be already discussed and agreed upon). The stability of LaTeX is very important and this means that changes to the kernel are necessarily very conservative. It also means that a lot of discussion has to happen before any changes are made. So if you do decide to post a pull request, please bear this in mind: we do appreciate ideas, but cannot always integrate them into the kernel and it is quite likely that we reject updates made in this way.
If you want to discuss a possible contribution before (or instead of) making a pull request, we suggest you raise the topic first on the LATEX-L list or drop a line to the team.
Historic LaTeX
Ulrik Vieth has collected historic versions of LaTeX from LaTeX 2.0 for TeX 1.0 (released on 11 December 1983) onwards. You can find them at ftp://ftp.tug.org/historic/macros/latex-saildart/. There might even be some earlier versions. All files have been pulled from the SAILDART archive site at http://z.baumgart.org/ (no longer online) which was based on archive tapes from SAIL at Stanford.
More historic material can be found at ftp://ftp.tug.org/historic (you may not be able to open this in all browsers — alternatively try https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/).
LaTeX is a document preparation system used for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is free software and is distributed under the LaTeX Project Public License.