Atom latex packages - which one to use?

[Kriechi]

Hi,

I'm recently having problems with the latextools package, which seems to be abandoned. Now I'm looking to modernize my latex integration in Atom with a new package (or multiple ones).

I found the package latex, which seems to provide similar functionally. I would like to see the Atom & LaTeX community to undergo some kind of unifying process, as already mentioned in some of the READMEs on various projects.

As the readme already mentions, James-Yu has moved on, leaving @ashthespy in charge.

@ashthespy and @thomasjo, would you mind briefly describing any differences between your two projects, and why you think there is a need for your project in specific? (leaving out the 5+ smaller ones out there...)

This might sound like a sales pitch, but I honestly would like to get the ball rolling. Are there any features that are worth porting over to the other project?

Thanks!

[thomasjo]

I don't know anything about this project. I created latex back in the early days of Atom since there was nothing else back then. I created it to scratch my own itch, but decided that since other's might find it useful that it was worth sharing it as a community package.

Why this package (atom-latex) was created instead of contributing to latex is only something @James-Yu can answer I suppose. While I'm a bit too busy with my research work (i.e. real job) these days to do much besides fixing critical bugs and triage issues, I have not intention of abandoning my package since I still use it every day for writing papers, etc.

[ashthespy]

I was having issues with high dpi screens and TeXworks - so I decided to give Atom a spin. To be honest - I initially used @thomasjo 's latex package - but didn't like a few things at the time (external pdf viewer, custom toolchains was limited to latexmk) so landed up here, and nipped and tucked at the package to suit my workflow. atom-latex is pretty much my daily drive - so bug fixes should find there way here - but feature requests are subject to my free time.

But while brainstorming here - @James-Yu do you think we could modularise both atom-latex and latex-workshop into latex specific (autocomplete, log parsing, etc) and editor specific api?

[Kriechi]

Thanks @thomasjo and @ashthespy for engaging here! Really appreciate it! I also opened an issue with the atom-latextools package, which is (was?) also quite popular: https://github.com/msiniscalchi/atom-latextools/issues/178

@ashthespy if you talk about modularisation, I would like to make a first proposal:

• Contribute syntax highlighting changes upstream into the popular language-latex package: https://github.com/James-Yu/Atom-LaTeX/tree/master/grammars https://github.com/area/language-latex/tree/master/grammars

Unless there is a really important feature or necessity for keeping a separate syntax definition, I would like to see this merged together.

I'm happy to help on making these things happen, if you think they are worth considering!

[kylebarron]

I agree about merging the syntax highlighting in this package and language-latex. They've diverged a bit and it's easier to keep track of only one package.

I would recommend merging the syntax highlighting changes from this package into language-latex, then removing the syntax highlighting files from this package, and requiring language-latex as a dependency when a user installs this package. You can use atom-package-deps to do this.

[JackSwett]

@kylebarron Stop making sense. No room for that on the internet.

[TiriaAndersen]

This sounds cool, would love to know how things are going.