TeXFlow

Write LaTeX, without writing LaTeX.

TeXFlow is a visual editor for real LaTeX files inside VS Code. It lets you focus on writing while keeping your .tex files intact, editable, and fully accessible.

Current stable release: 0.20.6.

TeXFlow does not replace LaTeX with a proprietary format. Your .tex files remain the source of truth. When TeXFlow cannot safely edit a complex construct visually, it preserves the underlying LaTeX rather than silently rewriting it.

Highlights

• Visual editing for article, report, book, and Beamer documents.
• Project-aware Visual editing across \input and \include files while preserving every source file separately.
• Build multi-file documents directly from Visual with Insert → Included file...: create a new .tex file or link an existing one, choose \input or \include, and remove the relationship later without deleting the file.
• Explicit master-document and active-document handling for multi-file projects.
• Workspace-aware project navigator with real .tex, .bib, and supported figure files; project-relative paths; and a resizable persistent sidebar.
• Project-wide labels and cross-references, including navigation, missing references, duplicate labels, and unused labels.
• Project-wide bibliography intelligence with search by citation key, author, title, and year; missing keys; unused entries; and citation/BibTeX navigation.
• Project Issues for project-wide reference, bibliography, and include diagnostics.
• Semantic paragraphs, headings, lists, and document structure.
• Visual creation/editing of title, author, abstract, and table of contents, including insertion points before the first structural block and after supported structural objects.
• Bold, italic, underline, color, and paragraph alignment.
• Unified Equation, Matrix, and System workflows with inline/display placement, semantic numbering, aligned equations, cases, matrices, delimiters, and common accents/symbols.
• Numbered/unnumbered structural editing, including safe align ↔ align* and section ↔ section* round trips.
• Figures with captions, labels, resize, rotation, subfigures, unified figure insertion, preserved file locations, and automatic Visual refresh when a referenced image is overwritten on disk.
• Tables with row/column editing, alignment, captions, labels, Booktabs, and CSV/TSV paste/import. Small compatible tables remain fully visual; large or structurally complex tables fall back to compact, editable LaTeX without losing source.
• TikZ figures with insertion, Figure properties, inline source editing, PDF preview, Source navigation, and promotion of a bare tikzpicture to a Figure.
• Beamer title-page editing for title, subtitle, author, institution, and date, plus frame operations including duplicate, move, disable/restore, blocks, columns, frame options, and frame-local text sizes.
• Comments and notes with Comment, TODO, FIXME, Author note, commented-out blocks, and document-order navigation.
• More robust Visual editing when VS Code closes background TextDocument objects: TeXFlow re-resolves documents by URI without opening Source as a side effect.
• Visual ↔ Source navigation that preserves the relevant document location, including cross-file navigation.
• Visual, Source, Split, and PDF workflows.
• Local spell checking with English and Spanish dictionaries and automatic/manual language selection.
• Focus mode, a cleaner document/slide presentation, and a simplified top-level menu structure.
• Conservative support for configured custom environments.
• Conservative preservation of unsupported LaTeX.
• Start from TeXFlow — create a standalone .tex file or a LaTeX project directly from the TeXFlow sidebar.
• Document search in Visual mode with Cmd/Ctrl+F, highlighted matches, and next/previous navigation, including across Beamer frames.

Installation

Visual Studio Marketplace

Install TeXFlow — Visual LaTeX from the VS Code Extensions view, or use the Marketplace listing:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=leandrozipitria.texflow

Install from VSIX

1. Download the .vsix from the GitHub release.
2. In VS Code, open the Extensions view.
3. Choose Install from VSIX....
4. Select the TeXFlow package.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.90 or newer.
• A working local LaTeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX.
• The tools required by your document, for example latexmk, bibtex, or biber when applicable.

Quick start

1. Open TeXFlow from the VS Code Activity Bar.
2. Choose New document or Open existing .tex.
3. For a new document, create either:
   • a standalone .tex file; or
   • a LaTeX project with main.tex, preamble.tex, and figures/.
4. Choose article, report, book, or Beamer.
5. Edit in Visual mode, or switch between Visual, Source, Split, and PDF.
6. Compile with your local LaTeX toolchain.

In multi-file projects, opening an included .tex file in TeXFlow keeps the master document for project-wide metadata and compilation while making the included file the active Visual editing target.

TeXFlow saves accepted visual edits back to the active .tex source automatically. While you type, the status shows Editing…; after a short pause TeXFlow writes the edit and returns to Saved. Ordinary Visual editing therefore does not require a separate save step. Standard Save and Save as... actions remain available when needed.

You can also right-click a folder in the VS Code Explorer to create a TeXFlow document there, or right-click a .tex file to open it with TeXFlow.

Documentation

• User Manual
• Troubleshooting
• Development and architecture
• Roadmap
• Changelog

Design principle

TeXFlow is intentionally conservative. Visual editing is used where the source can be parsed and serialized safely. Unsupported or highly customized LaTeX is preserved so that opening a document in TeXFlow does not require converting it to another document format.

LyX is used only as a technical reference for structural-editing problems that mature LaTeX editors have already confronted, such as paragraph semantics, embedded objects, cursor boundaries, and source preservation. TeXFlow's interface and visual editors are independent product decisions.

Development

npm ci
npm run check:fast

Run the full regression gate, including LaTeX fixtures, with:

npm run check

Create a release package with:

npm run check:release

See CONTRIBUTING.md for contribution guidelines.

Author and development approach

Created by Leandro Zipitria.

TeXFlow was designed and developed through an iterative human–AI collaboration. The product concept, design decisions, testing, and development direction are by Leandro Zipitria. Implementation code was generated with OpenAI's ChatGPT under the creator's direction and testing.

Repository

https://github.com/LeandroZipitria/texflow

License

MIT. See LICENSE.