TeX Live eXpress (tlx)

tlx is a high-performance alternative installer for TeX Live, written in Rust.

It is designed to drastically reduce the time required to install and set up TeX Live distributions by leveraging parallel network downloads, fast decompression pipelines, and optimized disk I/O.

🚧 Project Status 🚧

tlx is currently in an experimental phase and is not yet considered production-ready. Features and internal architectures are subject to breaking changes as development progresses.

Key Features

• Parallel Downloads: Concurrent package fetching via tokio and reqwest to fully saturate available bandwidth.
• Accelerated Decompression: Native LZMA/XZ package extraction optimized for multi-core processors.
• Security Verification: Automated integrity checks and PGP signature verification for TeX Live repositories.
• Fast ls-R Generation: Automatic and high-speed TeX file database generation upon installation completion.
• Lightweight & Standalone: Clean, modular CLI binary with no heavy external dependencies.

Installation

Building from Source (requires Rust)

Ensure you have a recent Rust toolchain installed:

git clone https://github.com/robitex/tlx.git
cd tlx
cargo build --release

Usage

Simply run the executable with the following command:

cargo run --release

Please note: at the moment, tlx installs only the scheme-full of TeX Live and works only on Windows as it is at an early stage of development.

License

This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0). See the LICENSE file for details.