NeoSetzer

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Simple yet full-featured LaTeX editor for Linux, Windows, and macOS, written in Python with GTK. (A fork of Setzer.)

This is a fork of Setzer by cvfosammmm. The original project site is https://www.cvfosammmm.org/setzer/, licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. This fork is maintained at https://github.com/Sam-Fic/NeoSetzer.

NeoSetzer is a LaTeX editor written in Python with GTK. Feedback on design, code architecture, bugs, and feature requests is welcome through this repository's issue tracker.

Based on the original project, a large number of components have been migrated to Libadwaita, which is modern and beautiful.

The UI/UX design has been thoroughly optimized; I hope you’ll appreciate the meticulous details I’ve crafted :)

Platform Support

NeoSetzer runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS from a single codebase. No platform fork or separate build is required.

Platform	Status	Runtime stack
Linux (Debian/Ubuntu 24.04+, Fedora, Arch, ...)	Fully supported	System GTK4 + libadwaita
Windows 10/11 (x86_64)	Supported via MSYS2	Portable MSYS2 mingw-w64 GTK4 stack
macOS Apple Silicon (ARM64)	Supported	Self-contained .app release package
WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)	Supported as Linux app	Linux distribution inside WSL

WebKitGTK note: The optional help-panel browser (WebKitGTK 6.0) is not packaged for MSYS2 mingw64, so it cannot be installed on Windows. NeoSetzer detects this at runtime (HAS_WEBKIT) and automatically falls back — search still works, only in-app HTML rendering is disabled. This is by design and does not affect LaTeX editing or PDF preview.

Installation

This fork is not published on Flathub. Ways to get it:

1. Windows portable zip — setzer_<version>_windows_x64.zip in the GitHub Releases of this fork. Extract anywhere and run mingw64\bin\setzer.bat; no MSYS2 or installer needed. See Using the portable zip.
2. Debian/Ubuntu package — Prebuilt .deb packages are published in the GitHub Releases of this fork. Check there for the latest build.
3. macOS Apple Silicon application — Download setzer_<version>_macos_arm64.zip, extract Setzer.app, and see macOS packaging notes for the current Gatekeeper and signing status.
4. Build from source (see below) — works on any Linux distribution or Windows (via MSYS2) with the dependencies available.

Running NeoSetzer with GNOME Builder

To run NeoSetzer with GNOME Builder, click the "Clone" button on the start screen, paste https://github.com/Sam-Fic/NeoSetzer.git, wait for the clone to finish, and press the play button. GNOME Builder will build NeoSetzer and its dependencies before launching it.

Warning: Building NeoSetzer this way may take a long time.

Running NeoSetzer on Debian/Ubuntu

NeoSetzer is developed and tested on Ubuntu.

Supported distributions: NeoSetzer requires WebKitGTK 6.0 (gir1.2-webkit-6.0), which is available on Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble) or newer and Debian 13 (trixie) or newer. On older releases (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12) the gir1.2-webkit-6.0 package does not exist and the .deb cannot be installed there. If you are on an older distribution, build from source as described below — the GTK4/WebKit bindings are resolved at runtime.

1. Run the following command to install prerequisite packages:

   # Run in a Linux terminal
   apt-get install meson ninja-build python3-gi gir1.2-gtk-4.0 gir1.2-gtksource-5 gir1.2-pango-1.0 gir1.2-poppler-0.18 gir1.2-webkit-6.0 gettext python3-cairo python3-gi-cairo gir1.2-adw-1 python3-numpy gir1.2-xdp-1.0

   Note: gir1.2-xdp-1.0 (the libportal GIR) is only used for Linux/Flatpak detection. It is not needed on Windows (see note below).

2. Clone the NeoSetzer repository from GitHub:

   # Run in a Linux terminal
   git clone https://github.com/Sam-Fic/NeoSetzer.git

3. Change into the NeoSetzer folder:

   # Run in a Linux terminal
   cd NeoSetzer

4. Run meson:

   # Run in a Linux terminal
   meson setup builddir

   Note: Some distributions may not include systemwide installations of Python modules which aren't installed from distribution packages. In this case, you want to install NeoSetzer in your home directory with meson setup builddir --prefix=~/.local.

5. Install NeoSetzer with:

   # Run in a Linux terminal
   ninja install -C builddir

   Or run it locally:

   # Run in a Linux terminal
   ./scripts/dev/setzer.dev

Running NeoSetzer on Windows

NeoSetzer supports Windows natively. The GTK4 runtime stack is provided by MSYS2 (the only reliable source of up-to-date GTK4 / libadwaita / GtkSourceView 5 / Poppler binaries on Windows).

There are two ways to get it running:

• Portable zip — the easy way, no MSYS2 required. See directly below.
• Build from source — for development or if you want to modify NeoSetzer. See Step 1 onwards.

Using the portable zip

setzer_<version>_windows_x64.zip is a self-contained build (~128 MB, ~349 MB extracted) that bundles Python, GTK4 and every other runtime dependency. Nothing needs to be installed and nothing is written to the registry.

1. Download setzer_<version>_windows_x64.zip from the GitHub Releases page.

2. Extract it anywhere you like — a USB stick, D:\Apps\NeoSetzer, your desktop. There is no fixed installation path.

   Right-click → "Extract All…" in File Explorer works. So does PowerShell:

   Expand-Archive setzer_74_windows_x64.zip -DestinationPath D:\Apps\NeoSetzer

3. Run mingw64\bin\setzer.bat inside the extracted folder — double-click it in File Explorer, or call it from cmd / PowerShell.

   PowerShell note: run it without quotes, or prefix it with the call operator (& "…\setzer.bat"). A bare quoted path is treated as a string and only echoed, not executed.

4. To pin it to the taskbar or Start menu, create a shortcut to setzer.bat (right-click → "Send to" → "Desktop (create shortcut)").

To uninstall, just delete the folder. Your settings live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\setzer (i.e. C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\setzer) and are kept across versions — remove that folder too if you want a completely clean state.

Do I still need MSYS2? No. Everything is bundled. Do not add the extracted mingw64\bin to your system PATH — if you also have MSYS2 installed, the two GTK4 stacks can shadow each other and cause hard-to-diagnose DLL errors.

LaTeX is still a separate install. The zip contains the editor, not a LaTeX distribution — see "Installing a LaTeX distribution on Windows" below.

Step 1 — Install MSYS2

Download and install MSYS2 from https://www.msys2.org/. Open the MSYS2 MINGW64 shell (not the default ucrt64/clang64 shell unless you know what you are doing — mingw64 is the tested configuration).

Step 2 — Install dependencies

In the MSYS2 MINGW64 shell:

# Run in the MSYS2 MINGW64 shell
pacman -S --needed \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-meson mingw-w64-x86_64-ninja \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk4 mingw-w64-x86_64-libadwaita \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-gtksourceview5 \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-poppler \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-python mingw-w64-x86_64-python-cairo \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-python-gobject \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-python-pip \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-python-numpy \
  gettext

No libportal: the package mingw-w64-x86_64-libportal does not exist in MSYS2 — libportal is only packaged for the msys subsystem, not mingw64. NeoSetzer only uses it (Xdp) for Flatpak detection, guarded by try/except, so it is simply omitted on Windows.

Then install the pure-Python libraries that are not packaged by pacman. MSYS2's Python is externally managed (PEP 668), so the --break-system-packages flag is required:

numpy comes from pacman, not pip. The MSYS2 MinGW Python reports the platform tag mingw_x86_64_msvcrt_gnu, so upstream win_amd64 wheels (including numpy's) do not match — pip install numpy falls back to a source build and fails/succeeds only after a very long compile. Always install numpy (and any other C-extension package such as scipy, pillow, …) via pacman as mingw-w64-x86_64-python-<name> instead.

Use the MinGW Python, not the MSYS one. Make sure python resolves to /mingw64/bin/python (python -c "import sys; print(sys.platform)" should print win32). If pip/python point at the msys interpreter instead, PyGObject and the pacman-installed numpy won't be found. Prefer python -m pip … to be explicit.

Step 3 — Clone and configure

# Run in the MSYS2 MINGW64 shell
git clone https://github.com/Sam-Fic/NeoSetzer.git
cd NeoSetzer
meson setup builddir

Step 4 — Run (development mode)

# Run in cmd / PowerShell (no MSYS2 needed)
scripts\dev\setzer.dev.bat

scripts\dev\setzer.dev.bat is the recommended Windows launcher — a thin wrapper that adds the source tree to PYTHONPATH (the setzer package is not installed into site-packages) and prepends mingw64\bin to PATH so the correct Python and the GTK4 / libadwaita DLLs are found, then runs the meson-built builddir\setzer_dev.py. It works from cmd, PowerShell, or a double-click in File Explorer, with no MSYS2 shell required.

PowerShell note: run it without quotes. A quoted path ("scripts\dev\setzer.dev.bat") is treated as a string and is only echoed, not executed.

Cross-platform alternative (run from the MSYS2 MINGW64 shell) — this is the path used to validate the build in this fork:

# Run in the MSYS2 MINGW64 shell
python scripts/dev/setzer.dev

A bare python builddir\setzer_dev.py fails with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'setzer' unless PYTHONPATH is set first — prefer the .bat or python scripts/dev/setzer.dev.

Step 5 — Install (optional)

# Run in the MSYS2 MINGW64 shell
ninja install -C builddir

This installs setzer.bat (and the Python setzer script) into the MSYS2 bin/ directory. After installation you can launch NeoSetzer by running setzer from any MSYS2 shell, or by adding <MSYS2>\mingw64\bin to your system PATH and running setzer.bat from cmd / PowerShell / Windows Terminal.

Installing a LaTeX distribution on Windows

To build documents from within the app, install one of:

• MiKTeX (Windows-native, recommended)
• TeX Live (cross-platform)
• Tectonic (single-binary, automatic dependency download)

Make sure the LaTeX engine you choose (pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex, or tectonic) is on your PATH, then pick it in the "Preferences" dialog under "LaTeX Interpreter".

Building your documents from within the app

To build your documents from within the app you have to install a LaTeX interpreter. For example if you want to build with XeLaTeX, on Ubuntu this can be installed like so: apt-get install texlive-xetex

To specify a build command open the "Preferences" dialog and choose the command you want to use under "LaTeX Interpreter".

Packaging

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

See docs/packaging/debian.md for the Debian package and release workflow.

Windows (portable zip / installer)

See docs/packaging/windows.md for the Windows portable-package workflow, and docs/packaging/macos.md for the macOS application-package workflow.

Getting in touch

Development and discussion for this fork take place on GitHub at https://github.com/Sam-Fic/NeoSetzer. For the original upstream project, see https://github.com/cvfosammmm/setzer.

Acknowledgements

NeoSetzer draws some inspiration from other LaTeX editors. For example the symbols in the sidebar are mostly the same as in LaTeXila, though I continue to change / reorganize them. The autocomplete suggestions are mostly the same as in Texmaker. I took some icons from Gnome Builder. Syntax highlighting schemes are based on the Tango scheme in GtkSourceView and the Gnome Builder Scheme.

Parts of the user interface are modeled after GNOME Text Editor.

License

NeoSetzer is licensed under GPL version 3 or later. See the COPYING file for details.