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What is VSCode?

VSCode is a source code editor and development tool. It contains a project explorer where all the files and folders are displayed. VSCode has a text editor with syntax highlighting, autocompletion and spell checking. In addition, it integrates terminals like Bash, ZSH or PowerShell and many more to run commands, applications and scripts. Please refer to VSCode's website for more information: https://code.visualstudio.com/

It is a useful tool to manage folder and file based structures. With its capabilities to install extensions such as LaTeX, it is quite convenient to compile a PDF document while continuing writing texts.

Some useful extensions for this project are:

  • Markdown+Math
    • Previewer for *.md files (e.g. README.md)
  • LaTeX Workshop by James Yu
    • Compiling and create PDFs from LaTeX code
    • LaTeX autocompletion, snippets etc.
  • LTeX – LanguageTool grammar/spell checking
    • Offline spell and grammar checker for markup languages like LaTeX, BibTeX and XHTML
    • Caveat: Doesn't work properly on Apple Silicon (M1/M2) as this extension doesn't install ARM64 version of Java. See issue #25 for the problem description and some possible workaround.

Another advantage is its seamlessly integration of Git. This make it easy to author new files, alter existing ones etc. and afterwards commit and push them to the working branch. The UI and an integrated file browser makes it easy to manage the changes being applied to the project.

Dev Container

VSCode has the opportunity to be used in conjunction with Docker containers (see Dev Containers). This makes it possible to run a standardized virtual environment in a Docker container which enables the user to write and create PDF files from a given LaTeX file structure (see Docker chapter). It's an easy and isolated way to create a LaTeX environment and everything a consumer or writer needs in order to compile the final PDF file. This project fully supports Dev Containers. The configuration can be found here devcontainer.json. It configures the Docker container and installs some extensions (e.g. for LaTeX) for VSCode. The same Docker recipe (see Dockerfile) is also used during the continuous integration cycle (see CI chapter).