Referring to .bib files in toolchain (to use bibtex manually)

If I’d rather manually compile my document than use latexmk, what placeholder would I use to refer to my .bib file when running bibtex? If I modify the toolchain to run bibtex main.bib where I typed in main by hand, bibtex runs correctly; I just don’t know how to have the toolchain automatically find my .bib from project to project.

[jabooth]

Hahaha yeah let’s not start a flame war! 😄 🔥

Well I’ve started playing around with some crazy experiments around how hard it would be to ship everything a user needs for LaTeX development inside LaTeX Workshop…

So that regardless of what platform you are on, you can just do the following:

1. Download VS Code
2. Install LaTeX Workshop

And it just works, without having to install any LaTeX distribution manually.

Sounds a bit mad I know, but I actually think it might be possible. You would need internet access the first time you encounter a new package to \include{} or whatever, but we would only download the exact files needed by the LaTeX compiler so it would stay pretty compact.

Basically what I have in mind is a bit like MikTeX auto installer, but on steriods, as it would be on the file level rather than package level.

[James-Yu]

Just Kidding! TLDR version MikTeX vs. TeXLive (my own opinion) 😆

• What MikTeX does better
  • Fast installation
  • Install missing packages on-the-fly
• What TeXLive does better
  • Everything else