Compile LaTeX on file save

[giacomogallina]

I'm sorry if this is a duplicate, but I wasn't able to quickly find a way to compile compile a .tex file to .pdf automatically when saving. More generally I would like to tell Helix to execute a specific command on file save, based on the file language. Is it already possible?

[the-mikedavis]

execute a specific command on file save, based on the file language

This is not currently possible.

From what I understand, the latex language server TexLab can compile and generate PDFs on save though. The documentation link here looks broken at the moment but it should be possible for the language server to do this as long as you have a TeX distribution installed

[cgahr]

Is this planed as a feature?

[giacomogallina]

Thanks! I realized that I had this already configured and somehow I had forgotten about it, sorry to have bothered you!
Anyway, for anyone else who might need this, this languages.toml seems to work:

[[language]]
name = "latex"
scope = "source.tex"
injection-regex = "tex"
file-types = ["tex"]
roots = []
comment-token = "%"
language-server = { command = "texlab" }
config = { texlab = { build = { onSave = true } } }
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "\t" }

[peredwardsson]

There are outside tools to use for this type of task as well if you prefer, for instance watchexec.

[yjhn]

latexmk with the -pvc option can do this too (see manual for details).

[pkoscik]

Yep, this is my very janky approach to this:

https://github.com/pkoscik/EngineeringThesis/blob/main/build.sh
https://github.com/pkoscik/EngineeringThesis/blob/main/poll.sh

watchexec detects file changes, then runs the texlive in a docker container and sends an update signal to MuPDF

[astro-ray]

Is this something that will be implemented in helix? Is there any plan for it?

[pascalkuthe]

it already works if you enable the texlab option (which I use regularly, never had any problems). Helix does not and will never contain any language-specific code so there is nothing beyond that will be accepted into core