The following document shows how to use and work with the NoTeX CLI utility and the associated LaTeX template.

Using the notex CLI Utility

Once installed (See installation for more details), the notex utility offers a set of useful commands to facilitate managing and working with your LaTeX projects.

The following table summarized the main notex commands and their purpose. Use it as a quick reference. Further details can be obtained running the notex help (or notex -h) command.

Command	Description
notex help	Shows notex binary options and help guide.
notex version	Shows current binary version.
notex info	Displays installation and current project information.
notex init .	Initializes a project in the current working directory.
notex clean <path>	Cleans recursively temporary files from the provided <path>.
notex get <snippet>	Provides a ready-to-use snippet LaTeX snippet template.
notex theme <theme>	Changes the current project theme.
notex add <what>	Adds a new section or bibliography (bib) to the current project.
notex remove <what>	Removes a section or bibliography (bib) from the current project.
notex ls	Lists the files that belong to the current project.
notex checkhealth	Checks the TeX environment, the installation, and the project's state.
notex set <key> <what>	Changes a whitelisted notex.json key directly.
notex reset	Regenerates main.tex from the template.
notex delete	Removes notex files and build artefacts, keeps your documents.

The following guide explores the different set of operations that can be performed with notex in more detail.

Note: This tutorial assume that the notex utility has been installed as a globally available binary.

Initialization

You can quickly setup a LaTeX project that uses the NoTeX template in the current directory (or in one of its sub-paths) via the init command:

notex init .
# or equivalent:
# notex init multi .

The default project initialization process will start a multi-file project that uses the NoTeX template. This means that a main.tex using the subfiles package will be initialized and a ./sections/ folder will be available with sections files. A sample project tree layout will look as the following:

An example of this multi-file project can be found in the examples directory.

In alternative, for smaller projects, a mono-file project with a single main.tex file using the template can be initialized by specifying:

notex init mono .

An example of this mono-file project can be found in the examples directory.

Both commands will also create a .notex/ directory at root level which contains useful NoTeX configurations and options.

Note: notex init refuses to overwrite an existing main.tex or .notex/ directory.
Pass --force to overwrite anyway.

In both cases, the generated main.tex automatically references \documentclass{settings/notex} when the target directory already holds a local installation, and \documentclass{notex} otherwise.

Management

Once you have a working project, notex implements a series of management utility commands to facilitate certain operations on your project.

Change theme

You can change the theme used by the LaTeX template with:

notex theme <theme_name>

where <theme_name> can be one of the available themes:

light (default)
dark
tokyo
bw

Manage sections and bibliography

You can add a section by running:

notex add section "My Title"

which will simply add a section in case of a mono-file project or directly add a new file containing a section in case of a multi-file project.

Accordingly you can remove a section by its section number <N>:

notex remove section <N>

As for the sections, two analogous commands exist for biblography.

To create bibliography.bib and wire it into main.tex:

notex add bib

To remove bibliography:

notex remove bib

Cleaning

You LaTeX projects surely will fill up with temporary files and build artefacts. notex implements a command to clean up your project and remove all the temporary files generated by the LaTeX build process:

notex clean <path>

Cleans recursively temporary files from the provided <path>.

Warning: Cleaned files are lost forever once the command runs. If you want to check which files will be removed *before actually removing them**, please run a "dry run" with:

notex clean --dry-run

This will list the files that will be removed by an eventual clean operation.

References and Snippets

You might need to get quick snippets references and usable LaTeX templates that the NoTeX theme implements in case you foget. notex implements a get command that can be used exactly for this reason:

notex get

Lists every ready-to-paste snippet name (info, warning, note, tip, important, caution, cbox, ebox, code, ...). While you can get a ready-to-use LaTeX snippet template by specifying the name of the desired environment:

notex get box       # displays a template matching the "box" description
notex get warning   # displays a template for the warning callout
notex get code      # displays a template for the code environemnt

State and Info

Some commands allow to investigate and query the current state of the project or to set related properties.

notex ls

Lists the files that belong to the project (main, sections, bibliography).

notex checkhealth

Checks the TeX environment, the installation, and the project's state.

notex set main_file alt.tex

Changes a whitelisted notex.json key directly (e.g., main_file, theme, bibliography_file, etc...).

notex reset

Regenerates main.tex from the template, backing up the old one to main.tex.bak.

notex delete

Removes .notex/, settings/, fonts/, and build artefacts; keeps your documents untouched. If you want to destructively remove the whole project run:

notex delete --all

Using the NoTeX template

The LaTeX template of the NoTeX project is directly available once notex installation is completed (See installation for more details).

Every NoTeX document loads the notex class instead of article:

\documentclass[light]{notex}

The bracketed option selects the theme, and the class itself pulls in a curated set of packages for fonts, math, figures, tables, TikZ diagrams, a styled table of contents, glossaries and acronyms, emoji, and FontAwesome icons, on top of two feature modules covered below: callout blocks and code blocks. Either module can be turned off with the nocallouts/nocode class options.

Note: Compiling requires LuaLaTeX (needed for the FontAwesome icons) with -shell-escape enabled (code blocks are highlighted through minted, which shells out to pygments).

The rest of this section shows each feature in brief. For a complete, compiled showcase, see the NoTeX documentation PDF, typeset from the examples/multi project.

Themes

Four built-in themes ship with the template, matching the ones notex theme <name> switches between on an initialized project:

Theme	documentclass option
Light	light (default)
Dark	dark
Tokyo	tokyo
Black & white	bw

Callout blocks

Colored and outlined boxes, admonitions, and math blocks highlight content outside the normal document flow:

\begin{cbox}
    A colored box.
\end{cbox}
 
\begin{warning}
    Something the reader should pay attention to.
\end{warning}
 
\begin{theorem}[Pythagorean Theorem][pythagorean]
    In a right triangle, $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$.
\end{theorem}

The full family includes cbox/ebox (colored/outlined boxes), warning, info/blueinfo, note, tip, important, caution, example, and the math blocks definition, theorem, corollary, proposition, lemma. Every one of them accepts an optional background/border color, and splits into an upper and lower part via \tcblower. Run notex get <name> for a ready-to-paste snippet of any of them.

Code blocks

Code is highlighted through minted, with one environment per language plus a generic fallback:

\begin{python}[caption = {A greeting function}, label = {lst:greet}]
def hello(name):
    print(f"Hello, {name}!")
\end{python}

caption and label turn the block into a numbered, referenceable listing, just like a figure; linenos, options, and tcb control line numbers and let raw minted/tcolorbox settings through. \cc{...} and \inline[lang]{...} cover inline code, plain and highlighted respectively, and pseudocode is a dedicated environment for algorithms that need real math mode. notex get code prints a ready-to-paste template.

Everything else

Math (amsmath, mathtools, siunitx, cleveref, ...), figures, tables, and TikZ diagrams all work exactly as in a normal article, styled to match the current theme. Acronyms are defined with \newacronym and used via \gls; \emoji{name} and \faIcon{name} insert emoji and FontAwesome icons respectively. A bibliography, added to a project with notex add bib, works with either biblatex or the classic \bibliography mechanism, whichever the project's \usepackage line for biblatex indicates.

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