[Tex/LaTex] How to manage LaTeX files in a directory

best practicesrevision control

I use LaTeX to generate all of the documents for my courses and as a result I have a lot of small documents in a given directory, which can then be hard to navigate due to all of the files generated when the .tex files are compiled. I have tried moving the output using output-directory and making an individual directory for each document but neither of these options have been entirely satisfactory. So my question is what methods of file management have worked for you with respect to LaTeX file management? Thanks.

Best Answer

This won't answer your question exactly, but it has worked for me.

I'm using Cornerstone, a subversion (version control) client that lets you manage you files (if you don't know what version control is, look it up!).

You can tell cornerstone to ignore all files of a specific file type so I set mine to ignore .aux .log .pdf etc. This way my repository won't get cluttered up. The working version does tend to get totally cluttered, but is isn't a problem since I only open .tex files from the main cornerstone window which doesn't display the ignored files.

Version control is also godsent for anyone working on big projects etc. Cornerstone is for mac and isn't free but there are free subversion clients for both mac, linux and windows.