ChkTeX pre-commit hooks

This package provides the minimal ChkTeX pre-commit hooks chktex-conda and chktex-system for LaTeX.

Installation

Make sure you have pre-commit installed.

Create a .pre-commit-confing.yaml file in the root of your repository with the contents:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/meliache/pre-commit-chktex
    rev: v0.2.1  # use the latest tagged version in the releases of this repository
    hooks:
      - id: chktex-conda  # install and use chktex via a conda
      # alternative: use the following line to use the system chktex
      # - id: chktex-system

As an ID use chktex-conda if you want to have ChkTeX to be automatically installed via conda¹ into a dedicated environment or use chktex-system to use the conda-executable that is available system-wide. If you already have ChkTeX installed, the system-version requires less setup but it has the disadvantage of not being fixed to a specific ChkTeX version. If you have multiple contributors, they might use different ChkTeX releases. chktex-conda installs the exact version specified in the environment.yml file.

By default the hook will run over all TeX files. To limit the files that the hook should run on, you can provide a file pattern to match via the files key in the yaml config.

Further Configuration

You can configure chktex rules, e.g. warnings to exclude, via a local chktexrc (Windows) or .chktexrc (Unix/Linux/Mac) configuration in the project root, named depending on your operating system². Check the ChkTeX manual for the extensive configuration options or start from an example configuration, e.g. https://github.com/overleaf/chktex/blob/master/chktexrc. This configuration should then also be used by IDE's, editors and language servers³ that use ChkTeX as a LaTeX linter. A minimal example could be a configuration that sets some command line arguments to chktex, e.g.

CmdLine
{
    # show verbose warnings, not just numbers
    --verbosity=2
    # don't warn on literal quote `"`, babel can work with that
    --nowarn 18
    # follow \input statements
    --inputfiles
}

Similar projects

Please contact me if this is a duplicate project, I thought a hook like this ought to exist already, but didn't find any with a simple google search. However, I found the following projects which have some overlap:

• flake-parts pre-commit-hooks.nix for NixOS contains a ChkTeX hook.
• mKaloer/pre-commit gist: A custom pre-commit script that can be copied manually to .git/hooks/pre-commit. It's simple, and might be all you need, but does not integrate with the pre-commit framework.
• jonasbb/pre-commit-latex-hooks : Custom LaTeX pre-commit hooks, independent of available linters. That means you won't see the errors in your editor/IDE until you actually try to commit.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. The conda version requires a conda installer. If you're not using conda anyway, I recommend installing a minimal conda installer like Miniconda or the newer Micromamba. The latter requires setting the PRE_COMMIT_USE_MICROMAMBA=1 environment variable (see the pre-commit conda documentation). ↩

2. Personally, I create a chktexrc file and a relative symbolic link to .chktexrc, on linux for example with ln -s chktexrc .chktexrc, and commit both, to ensure it works on all systems. ↩

3. I use the texlab language server, which can be used with any editor/IDE that has LSP support, e.g. emacs, vim or vscode. It allows enabling chktex via configuration options. ↩