This blog post is 100% human generated

re introduction

About 15 years ago I started building a LaTeX editor, ShareLaTeX. for the time was pretty impressive. Slowly it gained traction, it grew to have a few million users, we open sourced it, and eventually we sold it. The core of that editor today you might know as Overleaf.

I've not been part of Overleaf for a few years, when I left I was burned out with modern development and LaTeX as a whole. However the LaTeX editor problem is too engraned in my progesional DNA, every time I see a new technology, plactform, or technique I apply it to the problem of LaTeX editors in my head.

Limitations

From the side lines I've been watching new Overleaf competitors pop up over the years, in 2026 the number of AI slop clones of AI has exploded. Ocasionally an editor does something interesting, but generally I am pretty disapointed with what they offer.

The core architecutre of Overleaf is what I picked and was largely from what was available at the time, Mongodb, Nodejs microservices, Operational Transformation. All decent deicions in 2011, but

There are a lot of limitations due to the tech which always annoyed me, you have to be on a solid internet connection, compiles are remote but therefore not rapid, getting data in and out for intergration has too much friction.

The strengths were you could easily collaborate and the complex setup of a LaTeX enviroment was taken care for you.

Goals

The goal of Volt is broad but clear, firstly it is to be the best LaTeX editor possible with all the collaboratioin features that are table stakes today. Using other tools with it should be as low friction as possible, neovim, claude cli, git, random scripts, all need to work easily with it.

AI is too useful to ignore, but the AI usage needs to be useful, not another lazy shoe horned side pannel chat.

All of this has to be simple, most tex editor are too complicated for non developers, users shouldn't every touch a path, wory about a tex install. It needs to kust work.

Open source was exciting before, but created a lot of noise I don't want right now, it's likely i will open source in the future.