I want to start using LaTeX on Mac OS X. Where do I start?

MacTeX is your friend! This contains the latest TeXLive distribution.

Personally, I edit using Aquamacs with AUCTeX and friends enabled.


There are more integrated environments for editing Latex documents, but I'm happy with a good general-purpose text editor + a good PDF viewer + some scripts. One nice thing is that I don't need to learn that many different tools; I can use the same text editor for Latex files, programming, etc.

TextMate is fairly popular text editor for Mac OS X. It has a decent support for Latex, and it's easy to customise (e.g., you can define a keyboard shortcut that invokes a shell script that compiles your Latex document).

Preview (part of Mac OS X) is a good tool for previewing PDF files that you produce with pdflatex. My typical workflow:

  • First, open the source code in your text editor and open the PDF file in Preview (you can make this a bit more automatic by using some scripts). Leave both windows open.

  • Edit the document in your text editor and hit the keyboard shortcut that compiles the document. Then press cmd+tab to switch to Preview. It will notice that the file has changed and it'll reload the document automatically, without losing the current location.

In any case, download and install MacTex first to get started, as suggested in other answers. Among others, it'll provide all command-line tools such as "pdflatex" that you will need.


If you like Eclipse, you can get the TeXlipse package, which adds LaTeX handling features to the IDE including:

  • Syntax highlighting
  • Document outline
  • Code folding
  • Templates
  • Build support, also partial building
  • Annotations for errors (while editing)
  • Content assist (completion of commands and references)
  • Easy navigation with F3
  • Outline of the current file and the full project
  • Spell checking
  • Menu with common LaTeX math symbols
  • BibTeX editor and BibTeX-support
  • Line wrapping
  • Table editor
  • Support for several platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X)

I'd vote for a more lightweight text editor like Vim or Emacs, (Or their Mac-ified GUI equivalents listed above), or TextMate (Although I've never found the charm it seems to hold for others). But, lightweight vs. sumo is a matter of personal preference (And the size of your RAM).

Once again, MacTeX is the package you want to install LaTeX. After that, the editor you use is a matter of personal preference.

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