When I was in college, I had a Toshiba 3100SX running DESQview. I ran WordPerfect 5.1 on it and remember the joy of entering formulas in the equation editor: commands at the bottom, graphical text up top. I loved the responsiveness of seeing the math appear as I worked, every time I pressed F9 to redraw.

When I bought a SPARC 1+ for grad school and learned LaTeX, I was delighted. But I missed something: the tight integration of WordPerfect, even as I loved the mathematical expressiveness of LaTeX.

I settled on putting Emacs on one side and xdvi on the other. Over the years I replaced xdvi with xpdf, but the workflow was the same: each document started with the manual alignment of windows. How much screen real estate I conserved depended on the precision of my mouse work.

And I’ve always been a terminal person. I rejected Windows; I rejected X11, preferring to work inside screen. Around this I’ve gradually built a whole coherent workflow. I have a DESQview clone, GoblinView, that basically does what tmux does, with Kitty graphics and overlapping windows. I even have a WordPerfect clone called Goblin Purrfect that captures the exact equation editing I missed, including the default amber color of my high school Hercules display and college Toshiba, but with LaTeX and PDF export.

But today I decided 30 years was enough. For 30 years I waited for a side-by-side Emacs/image viewer, and now I have it.

Emacs running in Ghostty, with a PDF of the Gaussian integral on the left and its LaTeX source on the right.
ghostty-tex running in terminal Emacs inside Ghostty: PDF on the left, LaTeX source on the right. Click the screenshot to view it at full size.

The ghostty-tex project page has the package downloads and setup instructions.