Last October, I was thirty pages from finishing my master's thesis draft when Overleaf hung. Not an error. Not a crash. Just... spinning. "Compiling" for four minutes. Then a timeout.
I refreshed. It happened again. It was 11 PM, the university Wi-Fi was holding up fine, but Overleaf was clearly under load. Apparently thesis season is thesis season for everyone.
That night, I decided I was finally going to figure out local LaTeX on my Mac.
What I Actually Needed
I'd tried local setups before. The problem wasn't compiling — MacTeX handles that fine. The problem was the editing experience. After two years of Overleaf, I'd gotten used to certain things:
- Equation rendering as you type — seeing math rendered without a full compile
-
Some kind of input assist for math symbols — I can never remember
\varepsilonvs\epsilon, or exactly how\underbracenests - Smart error handling — Overleaf at least shows you which line errored. Bare TeX errors are cryptic.
TeXShop is great but stripped-down. VS Code + LaTeX Workshop is powerful but took me three hours to configure properly (and the SyncTeX setup broke twice). TeXstudio works but feels like a Windows app wearing a thin macOS disguise.
I needed something that felt like a real Mac app and didn't require a weekend of configuration to use.
Enter TeX64
A colleague mentioned TeX64 in a Slack thread about local LaTeX setups. I downloaded it, and within twenty minutes I had my existing project compiling.
Let me walk you through what actually surprised me.
The Visual Math Palette
This was the thing that made me feel like someone actually thought about the experience of writing math.
TeX64 has a symbol palette that lets you build equations by clicking — integral sign, limits, numerator, denominator — and shows you the rendered output in real time. The LaTeX it generates is completely standard and hand-editable afterwards.
Here's what this actually saves me: I write a lot of probability and statistics. I can never remember:
- Is it
\mathbb{E}or\mathds{E}? - How do I get a properly sized conditional probability bar in
P(A | B)? - What's the command for the Hadamard product again?
Instead of tab-switching to a LaTeX reference site and losing my train of thought, I click the symbol, it inserts, and I keep writing. It sounds like a small thing. Over a 120-page document, it adds up.
Axiom: The AI That Actually Reads Your Errors
TeX64 comes with an AI assistant called Axiom. I was skeptical — I've seen a lot of "AI writing assistants" that basically just dump generic suggestions.
Axiom is different because it reads your compile log and your actual source files together.
Here's a real example from my thesis: I had a \begin{align} block that I'd copied from an older paper and pasted into a new section. Somewhere in the copy-paste, the closing \end{align} got dropped. The compile error I got was:
! LaTeX Error: \begin{align*} on input line 492 ended by \end{document}.
That message, to a LaTeX beginner, tells you essentially nothing useful. Axiom looked at the log and the source and said: "Line 492 opens an align* environment that doesn't close before end of document. I found the likely location for a closing tag — here's the diff."
One click. Fixed.
It also generates LaTeX from natural language, which I use mostly for boilerplate I'd otherwise Google every time: tables, matrix environments, theorem/proof blocks. You describe it, it inserts clean LaTeX, you adjust as needed.
It Runs Entirely Offline
This is the fundamental point for me. The compilation runs on your Mac, using your local TeX installation (MacTeX or TeX Live). No internet means:
- No Overleaf timeouts — my M2 MacBook Air compiles a 120-page document in about 8 seconds, every time, regardless of what time of day it is
- No data going to a server — for sensitive research, this matters
- Works on trains, planes, cafes with spotty Wi-Fi — I wrote a significant chunk of my thesis on a Shinkansen
SyncTeX That Actually Responds
Click a paragraph in the PDF, jump to the source line. Click a source line, highlight it in the PDF. This is standard SyncTeX and Overleaf has it too — but when it's running locally with no round-trip to a server, the jump is instantaneous. It changes how you proof-read. You can actually scroll through the PDF and hop back to fix things fluidly.
What You Should Know Before Switching
I want to be honest about the limitations, because "I found a thing and everything is perfect now" is not how software works.
It's macOS only. If you need to hand off to a Windows collaborator who also wants to compile locally, they'll need a different tool.
You still need MacTeX or TeX Live. TeX64 is the editor; it doesn't ship with a TeX distribution. Installing MacTeX takes about 20 minutes the first time (it's a ~4GB download). After that, everything's local.
Real-time collaborative editing doesn't exist here. If you and your advisor are doing live back-and-forth edits simultaneously, Overleaf still wins. My workflow was to share via GitHub and Overleaf was only for sync, not real-time co-editing, so this wasn't a dealbreaker.
Heavy AI and OCR features have usage limits on the free tier. The basic Axiom functionality and the visual palette work without a paid plan. Heavier OCR workloads or very frequent AI completions may require upgrading.
My Actual Workflow Now
For context: I'm a grad student in applied math. I write a lot of equations, a lot of theorems, occasional figures with TikZ.
- Open TeX64 with my project (multi-file, one root
main.tex) - Compile is fast, SyncTeX is instant
- When I need a new equation, palette for the tricky parts, hand-type the rest
- When compile fails, Axiom usually finds it in one try
- PDF opens in a side panel, SyncTeX to jump around while proofreading
I've been on this setup for about five months. I have not had a single "Overleaf is slow right now" moment. That alone was worth the switch.
If you're on a Mac and you're done with the "Overleaf is timing out again" problem, give TeX64 a try. Free to download, you can have a project compiling within an hour if you already have MacTeX installed.
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