Make your LaTeX build output just show the important stuff (see here for before and after screen recordings):

QuieTeX is a minimal command-line tool which filters and colourizes the output of pdflatex in real-time. It is not a build tool, it does not do any clever summaries, it just makes it easier to read.

• Hides open/close file logging
• Colours errors red
• Colours warnings yellow
• TeX input prompt works in errorstopmode and scrollmode
• latexmk integration

To install:

pip3 install quietex

To use:

quietex pdflatex test.tex

To use with latexmk, add this to your latexmkrc:

# Make output prettier
eval `quietex --latexmkrc`;

To install in editable mode:

pip3 install -e .

Use pre-commit to check and format changes before committing:

pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

TODO:

• Show open-files stack before warnings and errors
• Display page numbers in real-time, before the end of the line
• Completions for TeX prompt
• Syntax highlighting for TeX snippets
• Configurable styles
• Collapse multiple blank lines, maybe remove all blank lines between single-line warnings
• Recognise multi-line warnings with (package name) continuations
• Highlight "Output written on" message
• Detect VS Code using $TERM_PROGRAM and disable colours, since it doesn't support them in the output window and doesn't distinguish between the output window and the terminal
• See if rich would be an easy drop-in for the status bar

The approach for colouring latexmk messages is inspired by this Stack Overflow answer. The way I've packaged latexmkrc is taken straight from mje-nz/pythontexfigures, my library for generating good-looking figures by integrating Python scripts into LaTeX documents.