Pre-requisites #

• VSCode (or any other compatible fork)
  • James Yu’s LaTeX Workshop extension
• An installation of a LaTeX distribution (such as TeXLive)
  • LuaLaTeX/LuaTeX (or your preferred LaTeX compiler)
  • latexmk

Settings #

The following JSON code can be added to either the projects settings at .vscode/settings.json, or to the global settings at ~/.config/Code/User/settings.json such that LuaLaTeX is used to compile .tex files every time they are saved within VSCode.

{
	// ...
	"latex-workshop.latex.tools": [
		{
			"name": "lualatexmk",
			"command": "latexmk",
			"args": [
				"-synctex=1",
				"-interaction=nonstopmode",
				"-file-line-error",
				"-lualatex",
				"-outdir=%OUTDIR%",
				"%DOC%"
			]
		}
	],
	"latex-workshop.latex.recipes": [
		{
			"name": "lualatexmk",
			"tools": [
				"lualatexmk",
			]
		}
	],
	// ...
}

These settings can be further modified if you need to use multiple compilation steps in sequence, or if you want to use different compilation settings. I found latexmk to be immensely useful when a document should be compiled multiple times, especially when a single compilation produces metadata for a subsequent compilation.

Disabling Automatic Compilation #

In case you want to work on a .tex document, but you don’t VSCode to compile it for you every time you save it, you can override the global settings with the following JSON code, added to .vscode/settings.json.

{
	// ...
	"latex-workshop.latex.recipes": [],
	"latex-workshop.latex.autoBuild.run": "never",
	// ...
}