Hi HN, I'm Toby. While working on a research paper earlier this year, I got progressively frustrated with the available LaTeX editors. Most need a paid subscription service to enable proper collaboration, are clunky, and shove distracting non-features in your face.

This is why I built Aldine. It is a collaborative LaTeX editor that you can run yourself: two containers, every project as a git repo, and AGPL licensed. Documentation: https://aldine.dev

You can try it without signing up at https://demo.aldine.dev (public and wiped every night, so don't leave your thesis there). Create a project, or drop in a ZIP you downloaded from Overleaf.

My co-authors want a super simple and browser-based UX. I want git. On Overleaf's cloud the Git integration is a premium feature, and I got tired of copy-pasting files between the two worlds. In Aldine, a colleague who works in VS Code clones the project, commits and pushes, and the people in the browser pull those commits in with one click. Branches, history with diffs, and GitHub/GitLab/Gitea sync all work from the UI.

Smaller things: live cursors (Yjs underneath), warm recompiles in about two seconds, a compiler container with no network access. And as of this week you can also sign in through your own OIDC provider, so Authentik, Keycloak or Authelia all work.

There's an MCP connector as well, off by default. Claude can edit, compile and fix, and every edit lands as a git commit you can revert.

It's v0.x, with rough edges I know about (no keystroke-level track changes yet, and CJK needs the full TeX Live image) and surely some I don't.

How do you and your co-authors handle LaTeX today? What would Aldine need to do or support before you would consider moving your next paper to it?