TeXstudio-style Workflow

A VS Code extension for large LaTeX projects (books, lecture notes) with many chapters, figures, and TikZ diagrams: standalone chapter or whole-document builds, navigation, checks, Ukrainian typography, and project-wide refactoring. Full documentation in Ukrainian: see LaTeX-VSCode-setup.md in the repository.

Українською: розширення VS Code для великих LaTeX-проєктів — збірка розділу чи всього документа, навігація, перевірки, українська типографіка, рефакторинг по проєкту.

Features

Build. F5: compile the current file (a chapter or a figure) standalone and open the PDF; Shift+F5: the whole document. Compile on save, stop, clean auxiliary files, SyncTeX in an external viewer, a "Chapters" panel with per-chapter builds or selected \parts.

Navigation. Clickable file names in \input, \includegraphics, \localinput; go to macros defined in .cls/.sty; go to any heading in the whole project; outline and panels in the Activity Bar.

Labels, references, bibliography. Project-wide label completion and rename, duplicate and undefined label checks, equations nobody refers to, completion and hover for \cite{…} from .bib files (author, year, title), add an entry from a DOI.

Text and formulas. Ukrainian typography (non-breaking spaces, dashes, «guillemets»), table alignment, Format tblr for tblr/longtblr/talltblr (options one per line, cells in a grid), Renumber Beamer Slides, column operations, normalize a file or the whole project, frames around headings and formulas, formula environment conversion, Unicode → LaTeX.

Refactoring. Rename and reorder chapters with updates to lists, paths, and references; project-wide replace that skips comments and verbatim; notation consistency checks (\varepsilon/\epsilon, etc.); project snapshots with restore.

Other. Document and fragment templates, extracting tikzpicture into separate files, project statistics, a TODO list, chapter changes against a git revision (latexdiff), a "Problems" panel from the build log, environment check.

Requirements

• TeX Live (or MiKTeX) with latexmk; LuaLaTeX for Cyrillic templates.
• Optional: texlogsieve for the problem report, latexdiff, git, SumatraPDF (Windows) for the external viewer. The Check environment command shows what is found and what is missing.
• VS Code 1.60 or newer (the Problems panel badge counter: 1.72+).

Important: which conventions are assumed

Some features assume the author's project layout: chapters in X/X.tex folders with Pictures/ and tikz/ inside, the main file including chapters via the \includechapter{X} and \multiinclude{A, B} macros, and chapters using \localinput and \currfilebase. Macro names and the main file are configurable (tssworkflow.mainFile, tssworkflow.chapterIncludeMacro, tssworkflow.chapterListMacros). The remaining features (typography, tables, labels, \cite, checks) do not depend on this.

Getting started

1. Open your project folder. If it has no .tex files yet, click New from template or Create project settings in the extension panel.
2. The Create project settings command creates .vscode/settings.json with the main file and the required parameters.
3. All commands: the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), the TSS Workflow prefix, or the extension panel in the Activity Bar. Settings: Settings → tssworkflow.

Privacy

The extension does not collect or send any data. The only network request: the Add BibTeX entry from DOI command contacts doi.org with the DOI you enter.

Safety of changes

Commands that modify many files (chapter rename, project-wide replace, project normalize, notation unification) take a snapshot of the project sources in the extension storage before running; it can be restored with the Restore snapshot command. This complements git, not replaces it.

Known limitations

Chapter names for the rename command: Latin letters, digits, _, - only. Batch commands should first be tried on a copy of a large project.