I Finally Ditched Overleaf for a Local LaTeX Editor — Here's What Actually Works

Last October, I was thirty pages from finishing my master's thesis draft when Overleaf hung. Not an error. Not a crash. Just... spinning. "Compiling" for four minutes. Then a timeout. I refreshed. It happened again. It was 11 PM, the university Wi-Fi was holding up fine, but Overleaf was clearly under load. Apparently thesis season is thesis season for everyone. That night, I decided I was finally going to figure out local LaTeX on my Mac. What I Actually Needed I'd tried local setups before. The problem wasn't compiling — MacTeX handles that fine. The problem was the editing experience. After two years of Overleaf, I'd gotten used to certain things: Equation rendering as you type — seeing math rendered without a full compile Some kind of input assist for math symbols — I can never remember \varepsilon vs \epsilon , or exactly how \underbrace nests Smart error handling — Overleaf at least shows you which line errored. Bare TeX errors are cryptic. TeXShop is great but stripped-down. VS