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AUCTeX vs LaTeX Workshop: catalog facts
AUCTeX	LaTeX Workshop
Free Free software from the GNU Project.	Free Free and open source under the MIT licence.
Windows, macOS, Linux	Windows, macOS, Linux
Supports LaTeX, ConTeXt, Texinfo, AMS-TeX and docTeX preview-latex shows formulas as images in the source	Auto build with configurable LaTeX recipes Internal PDF viewer with SyncTeX
Requires GNU Emacs and familiarity with it Needs a separate TeX distribution to compile documents	Requires Visual Studio Code and a separately installed TeX distribution Latest version needs a recent VS Code release
Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: GPL-3.0-or-later	License: MIT
No account needed	No account needed
Works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.