Visual Studio Code LaTeX Workshop Extension

LaTeX Workshop is an extension for Visual Studio Code, aiming to provide core features for LaTeX typesetting with Visual Studio Code.

This project won't be successful without contributions from the community, especially from the current and past key contributors:

• Jerome Lelong @jlelong
• Takashi Tamura @tamuratak
• Tecosaur @tecosaur
• James Booth @jabooth

Thank you so much!

Note that the latest version of LaTeX-Workshop requires at least VSCode 1.114.0 (April 2026 or later).

Manual

The manual of the extension is maintained as a wiki

Table of Contents

• Home
• Installation and basic settings
  • Requirements
  • Installation
  • Setting PATH environment variable
  • Settings
  • Usage
    • Supported languages
  • Using Docker
  • Using WSL
• Compiling
  • Building the document
  • Terminating the current compilation
  • Auto build LaTeX
  • LaTeX recipes
    • LaTeX tools
    • Placeholders
  • Multi file projects
  • Cleaning generated files
  • Catching errors and warnings
  • External build command
  • Magic comments
  • Building a .jnw file
  • Building a .rnw file
• Linting
  • Duplicate labels
  • Chktex
• Viewing & SyncTeX
  • Internal PDF viewer
    • Color
    • Invert mode
  • SyncTeX
  • External PDF viewer
    • Using SyncTeX with an external viewer
• Formatting
  • LaTeX files
  • Bibtex files
• Intellisense
  • Citations
  • References
  • Commands
  • Environments
  • Files
  • Bibtex Files
  • @ suggestions
    • Inserting Greek letters
    • Handy mathematical helpers
• Snippets and shortcuts
  • Environments
  • Sectioning
  • Font commands
  • Mathematical font commands
  • Surrounding text
  • Miscellaneous actions
• Hovering and previewing features
  • Documentation of a package
  • Previewing equations
  • Previewing graphics
  • Previewing citation details
  • Previewing references
  • Documentation of a command
• Playing with environments
  • Inserting an environment
  • Itemize like environments
  • Navigating and selecting
  • Changing between \[...\] and \begin{}...\end{}
  • Closing the current environment
  • Surrounding selection with an environment
• Extra features
  • Structure of the document
  • Code folding
  • Counting words
  • Literate programming support using LaTeX
• VS Code Remote Development
• FAQ and common issues

Features (Taster)

This is not a complete list but rather a preview of some of the coolest features.

• Build LaTeX (including BibTeX) to PDF automatically on save.

  👁 build process gif
  

• View PDF on-the-fly (in VS Code or browser).

  👁 demo of preview feature
  

• Direct and reverse SyncTeX. Click to jump between location in .tex source and PDF and vice versa.

  👁 demo of SyncTeX
  

• Intellisense, including completions for bibliography keys (\cite{}) and labels (\ref{}).

  👁 intellisense demo
  

• LaTeX log parser, with errors and warnings in LaTeX build automatically reported in VS Code.

  👁 error reporting demo
  
  • Linting
  👁 auto \item demo
  

• Snippets

  • A lot of LaTeX commands can be typed using snippets starting in \, then type part of the command to narrow the search.

    👁 auto \item demo
    

  • Surround some selected text with a LaTeX command using ctrl+l, ctrl+w (⌘+l, ⌘+w on Mac). A new menu pops up to select the command. This works with multi selections. The former approach using \ has been deprecated.

    👁 wrap demo
    

  • We also provide a few other suggestion mechanisms

    • Greek letters are obtained as @ + letter. Some letters have variants, which are available as @v + letter. See here.

      👁 greek letters demo
      

    • Common environments can be obtained by BXY where XY are the first two letters of the environment name, eg. BEQ gives the equation environment. If you want the star version of the environment, use BSXX, eg. BSEQ gives the equation* environment. See here.

      👁 BSAL demo
      

    • Common font commands can be obtained by FXY where XY are the last two letters of the font command name, eg. FIT gives \textit{}. See here.

      👁 FBF demo
      

    • Many other maths symbols can be obtained with the @ prefix. See here.

      👁 \frac shortcut demo
      👁 \int shortcut demo
      

• Shortcuts

  • In addition to snippets, there are shortcuts provided by the extension that allow you to easily format text (and one or two other things).

    👁 \emph{} demo
    

• When the current line starts with \item or \item[], hitting Enter automatically adds a newline starting in the same way. For a better handling of the last item, hitting Enter on a line only containing \item or \item[] actually deletes the content of the line. The alt+Enter is bind to the standard newline command. This automatic insertion of \item can be deactivated by setting latex-workshop.bind.enter.key to false.

  👁 auto \item demo
  

• Preview on hover. Hovering over the start tag of a math environment causes a mathjax preview to pop up.

  👁 equation hover demo
  

GitHub

The code for this extension is available on github at: https://github.com/James-Yu/LaTeX-Workshop

Like this work?

• :smile: Star this project on GitHub and Visual Studio Marketplace
• :blush: Leave a comment
• :relaxed: Thank the develops and community for their effort.

License

MIT