TLCockpit - GUI frontend to tlmgr

TLCockpit aims at being a GUI for tlmgr, the TeX Live Manager, with a modern look and feel. We take inspiration from the TeX Live Utility.

Installing/Running

Since TLCockpit is included in TeX Live, it will be probably already installed on your system. In case it isn't, a simple call to tlmgr install tlcockpit should suffice.

We are providing new jar files on the github page, but update the copy in TeX Live only at certain intervals. If you want to try out the latest and greatest, get tlcockpit.jar and put it into TEXLIVEROOT/texmf-dist/scripts/tlcockpit replacing the current tlcockpit.jar.

After this you can run it by simply typing tlcockpit, or via a direct java call as in java -jar PATH/TO/tlcockpit.jar.

Debugging can be enabled by passing the option -d or, for more detailed debugging -dd.

Requirements

Currently TLCockpit is shipped with two jars, one for JDK8 and one for JDK9+. The JDK8 version does not contain the JavaFX as it is normally shipped together with the JDK. The JDK9+ version contains JavaFX modules and thus should work without the need for additional installations.

The default for TLCockpit shell wrapper (used on Unix and Mac) is to check for the version of Java (using java -version) and use the appropriate jar.

If you are running Java 8 and see the following errors

Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javafx/event/EventTarget
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:763)
...

that means that the Java installation does not provides JavaFX.

On Windows the latest JRE from Oracle include JavaFX. On Linux one might need to install some extra packages (Debian/Ubuntu: openjfx).

HiDPI support

Depending on your JDK version and operating system, Java might not correctly detect the presence of a HiDPI screen.

Upgrading to JDK14 should help in this case.

For other versions, you might be able to fix it by setting the environment variable

export GDK_SCALE=2

(or even =3) might help.

Development

Development is done in Scala with the ScalaFX widget set. The project is mainly a challenge for myself to learn Scala. Building is done with sbt, opening the project in IntelliJ works fine.

Deployment is done via sbt assembly which packs all the necessary libraries into one jar file.

Contributions are welcome, improvements are easily done as I just started writing Scala and my style is horrible ;-)