coeditor-cli

An editor that never claims authorship. Point it at a LaTeX paper folder and it opens a local browser workspace where you read the compiled PDF, highlight text, attach comments, and hand them to a claude or codex CLI running in an embedded terminal. The agent edits your .tex; the PDF recompiles; every run is reviewable as a marked-up diff PDF and restorable from a git-backed timeline. The paper stays yours, in your files, in your git history.

npx coeditor-cli path/to/paper

The npm package is coeditor-cli; the command it installs is coeditor. So npm i -g coeditor-cli and then just coeditor path/to/paper.

That starts a server on http://localhost:4560 (next free port if taken) and opens a browser. The folder is registered as a project; if it is not a git repo yet, one is initialized so versions can be tracked.

Useful flags:

npx coeditor-cli .                  # the current directory
npx coeditor-cli paper --no-share   # loopback only: no LAN/phone link, no QR code
npx coeditor-cli paper --no-open    # don't open a browser
npx coeditor-cli paper --port 4600
npx coeditor-cli --doctor           # report the agents and TeX toolchain found
coeditor --hub-claim <code>         # link this machine to a hub (coedit.pub)
coeditor --update                   # fetch, verify and install a newer build

coeditor --help lists the rest.

Without --no-share the server also binds your LAN address and prints a QR code with an access token in the URL — that link controls your terminals, so treat it like a password.

Linking to a hub is what lets someone reach the paper from outside your network: the machine dials out over a reverse tunnel, nothing is exposed inbound, and a person you invite is a commenter — the PDF, the diffs and the comments, and nothing else. Papers are not shared until you say so, one at a time. --no-hub keeps a linked machine from dialling at all.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22–25. 22 is what CI and the packaged builds run; 24 and 25 are exercised daily. node-pty is a native addon, so the range stops where the testing does rather than promising a major nobody has run.
• An agent CLI: claude or codex on your PATH (WSL installs are detected from Windows too). Optional — the editor, PDF viewer, comments and timeline all work without one.
• A TeX toolchain: latexmk with a real TeX distribution (TeX Live, MacTeX, MiKTeX) is best. If none is found, coeditor downloads a private Tectonic binary into its config directory and uses that. latexdiff and synctex are optional: diff PDFs are produced by a built-in perl-free engine either way, so a missing latexdiff only makes the markup slightly plainer, and a missing synctex drops selection→source mapping back to fuzzy text matching.
• git, for the version timeline.

State (access token, project registry, settings, downloaded tools) lives in ~/.coeditor; set COEDITOR_CONFIG_DIR to move it.

Full documentation

See the project README for the architecture, the comment format, keyboard shortcuts, the desktop builds and everything else.

MIT licensed.