TeX in manjaro linux

Question

I install texlive in manjaro and didn't work, so I try the miktex and it only work in the texstudio when I change the 'comands ($path) to home/user/bin it works but only to texstudio. How can I make the path default for other software? I'm using manjaro gnome.

Answer 1

On your Linux every folder which is contained in your PATH variable is searched for executables. So when you install your TeX Live or MiKTeX you have to add the folder where the binaries are to that environment variable.

The PATH variable has the format path1:path2:path3 (so each path is separated by a colon). And each path should be an absolute path starting at root. A normal PATH variable could look like the following:

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin

If you want to add a folder to your PATH you can do so using export in your default shell's rc. If you want to append something to an existing PATH variable, you can do so like this (put that line in your .bashrc if you're using bash as your login shell, or .zshrc if you're using zsh, or...):

export PATH="$PATH:/other/path/to/folder"

So, to add your /home/user/bin to your PATH so that all applications you run can find the binaries of your LaTeX installation, you could add the following to your rc:

export PATH="$PATH:/home/user/bin"

Make sure to only put a colon between two paths, not at the end of the list.

The PATH is searched from first to last element. The above appends stuff to your PATH, meaning it will use your system's binaries where possible and fall back to the ones in your custom folder. If you want the opposite behaviour (using the binaries of your /home/user/bin folder where possible, and falling back to system binaries) you should prepend the folder:

export PATH="/home/user/bin:$PATH"

Please note that this has security implications (as pointed out by cfr)!