TarTeX context menu extension for nautilus

nautilus-tartex is a context menu extension for the GNOME Files app, nautilus, to enable one-click generation of tarball of all files needed to compile your LaTeX project using tartex.

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • Pre-requisites
  • Install using meson
• Usage
• License

Installation

Pre-requisites

The command line utility tartex version 0.11.0 or higher must be installed and in PATH.

nautilus-tartex depends on the following libraries and their Python bindings exposed via gobject-introspection:

• libadwaita-1.0
• gtk-4.0
• glib-2.0
• pango
• nautilus-python

Additionally, meson is recommended for installing, because it checks whether all requirements are satisfied before installing.

However, if you are sure of all pre-requisites being installed in your system, you may simply copy over the src/nautilus_tartex.py and src/nautilus-tartex.ui files into your nautilus-python extensions directory, typically at $XDG_DATA_HOME/nautilus-python/extensions/.

Install using meson

Download and extract a release tarball. cd into the extracted directory and use meson to configure and install the extension using one of the following modes (from a console):

1. As a regular, non-privileged user:

   meson setup -Duser=true build
   meson install -C build

   OR
2. With root privileges:

   meson setup build
   sudo meson install -C build

Quit open nautilus windows (nautilus -q) and re-launch nautilus to see nautilus-tartex in action.

Usage

Note: Only works on single file selections.

Right click on the main .tex or .fls file in a LaTeX project and select "Create a TarTeX archive" from the context menu.

When clicking on an .fls file, the input sources listed in this record file are directly added to the resulting tarball, named identically to the fls filename (sans extension) with a time-stamp appended to it. This naming scheme allows you to create and store snapshots of your TeX project as it evolves. Note that no checks are made as to whether the tarballed TeX project will compile when the trigger file is .fls.

When clicking on a .tex file, the tarball procedure follows the usual tartex route of checking the cache, recompiling sources in a temporary directory if it is stale, and including the required sources detected from either the cache or logs from the re-compile.

nautilus-tartex automatically routes tartex into the latter's git-rev mode if it detects a .git directory inside the project.

If tartex fails to create the archive, nautilus-tartex launches a dialog box relaying output messages from tartex. The dialog box offers basic searching and, when the error is due to LaTeX compilation failure, a button to open the full LaTeX compilation log. It also provides a toggle bar to optionally filter the output messages by errors or warnings.

License

© 2025 Atri Bhattacharya

nautilus-tartex is distributed under the terms of MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.