Our CS department (of University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt) offers a LaTeX template to our students, that they can use to create Bachelor’s and Master’s theses. This template can be found here.

Quite frequently, I am contacted by students, that want to use LaTeX for the creation of there academic papers or (bachelor or master) theses, but struggle with the setup of a working LaTeX environment. Thus, I want to use this article to give an introduction to the LaTeX environment that I use personally. This article covers the setup of the following tool chain:

• TeX Live (link - version installed on my machine: TeX Live 2016) - very popular LaTeX distribution that brings along a huge number of packages.
• Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code - link - version installed on my machine: 1.22.2) - rather lightweight but very powerful IDE that brings great extendability for a vast variate of different languages.
• LaTeX Workshop (link - version installed on my machine: 5.3.1) - extension for Visual Studio Code that aims to provide all-in-one features and utilities for LaTeX typesetting (list of features can be found here).

Many Linux distributions bring along Bash as their standard shell. Thus, I have been using it for years. However, a couple of months ago I was made aware of Z shell (Zsh) and have been using ever it since on a daily basis. In this time, I have come to love it and enjoy working with it very much. Thus, I want to outline some of my key findings and learnings in this post.