Compiling a LaTeX/BibTeX document is a tedious process does not integrate very well with the make idiom. Until now, I used [rubber][] to compile my documents. However, there are several shortcomings that make rubber only a good rather than a perfect solution. Most notably, it is basically unmaintained for years now with the current release dating back to 2006. This wouldn’t be a big issue if it weren’t for some annoyances such as in-source specification of the LaTeX compiler¹ and the inability to specify additional flags (e.g. -shell-escape).

Thanks to Austin Clements and his a spiritual successor to rubber, [latexrun][], the days of frustration and despair are over now. The name might not be as sexy but the feature list and improvements are certainly impressive. Most importantly, latexrun spits out errors and warnings in a format that makes Vim’s quickfix window happy and I can finally specify commands and arguments willy-nilly from outside of my document.

(Un)fortunately, latexrun likes to output auxiliary files in a separate build directory called latex.out. While that works for most packages, it [breaks][] with the source highlighting package minted. As a temporary workaround, one can use the -O . option to use the current working directory as the build directory. But apart from that issue, I am very happy with this little program.