Keep the PDF
beside your LaTeX.

Thirty years was enough.

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.

One command from source to page.

Open a .tex file in Emacs inside Ghostty. With the package enabled, C-c C-c saves the buffer, runs LaTeX, and opens or refreshes the PDF after a successful AUCTeX compilation. It means Ctrl+C followed by Ctrl+C.

The page keys work while you stay in the source buffer. To keep AUCTeX’s usual compile binding, set ghostty-tex-take-over-compile to nil before enabling the mode.

The package also sends copied and killed text to the terminal’s clipboard using OSC 52. Paste from the system clipboard with your terminal’s paste shortcut; this integration only writes to that clipboard.

LaTeX typesets. Emacs arranges. The terminal draws.

1. AUCTeX runs LaTeX. The output is the document’s ordinary PDF.
2. DocView renders the pages. Emacs’s document viewer converts the PDF into PNG images, using mutool when available.
3. kitty-graphics sends the pixels. The bundled graphics library transmits the image through the terminal’s Kitty graphics protocol.
4. ghostty-tex manages the editing loop. It arranges the panes, refreshes the output, and keeps track of the page you were reading.

Render for the display that is attached now.

A terminal cell has a size in pixels as well as a position in the text grid. The preview uses fresh cell measurements and the PDF pane’s dimensions to choose its rendering resolution. The default scale is 2.0, giving the source image extra pixels for sharp text. Set kitty-graphics-doc-view-resolution-scale to 1.0 for rendering sized to the display, or nil to disable adaptive DPI.

Version 0.1.4 also handles a less glamorous detail: DocView can be rewriting a page while the graphics code tries to read it. Incomplete PNGs are retried instead of being remembered as successfully transmitted images.

The same arrangement over SSH.

Run Emacs and the conversion tools on the remote machine, with Ghostty on the machine in front of you. The early-init helper recognizes TERM=xterm-ghostty before Emacs initializes its terminal. The remote host also needs Ghostty’s terminfo entry. In tmux, enable set -g allow-passthrough on; tmux 3.6 or later provides the live client cell dimensions used by adaptive rendering.

The complete connection must carry Kitty graphics. An SSH setup working directly does not imply that every multiplexer or stock Mosh setup will carry the images too.

Install into your existing Emacs setup.

You need Emacs 27.1 or newer, Ghostty, a LaTeX installation with pdflatex, and PDF conversion tools. AUCTeX is recommended and is the compile-and-preview path shown above.

brew install emacs ghostscript imagemagick mupdf
brew install --cask ghostty mactex-no-gui

sudo apt-get install emacs ghostscript dvipng \
  texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-recommended \
  mupdf-tools imagemagick ncurses-bin

1. Install the package.

Download ghostty-tex-0.1.4.tar. In Emacs, run M-x package-install-file and select the downloaded file. Install AUCTeX with M-x package-install RET auctex RET if you do not already have it.

2. Load the early terminal helper.

Add this to ~/.emacs.d/early-init.el. The path below is for the standard package.el installation directory.

(load (expand-file-name
       "elpa/ghostty-tex-0.1.4/ghostty-tex-early.el"
       user-emacs-directory)
      nil t)

3. Enable the mode.

Add this to your Emacs init file, after your package setup:

(require 'ghostty-tex)
(ghostty-tex-mode 1)

Restart Emacs inside Ghostty, visit a LaTeX file, and press C-c C-c. The README also covers installation by unpacking the drop-in archive.

To disable the integration, use M-x ghostty-tex-mode or (ghostty-tex-mode -1). To uninstall, remove the configuration above and use M-x package-delete RET ghostty-tex RET, then restart Emacs.

Download it. Read it. Build it.

The package is Emacs Lisp. Emacs compiles it during installation; the same archive can be used on macOS and Linux.

• Emacs package.tar / install with package-install-file ↗
• Drop-in archive.tar.gz / unpack and add to load-path ↗
• Complete source.tar.gz / Lisp, Makefile, tests, and licenses ↗

SHA-256 checksums / README / Screenshot’s LaTeX document

From the extracted source, make check builds both package archives, byte-compiles the Lisp, runs nine rendering tests, and tests installation in a temporary Emacs package directory. All ten tests passed for this release on this Mac.

Written by Adam DePrince. ghostty-tex is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. It bundles kitty-graphics.el by cashmere under GPL-2.0-or-later, and builds on AUCTeX, Emacs DocView, and Ghostty.