Why?

I don’t like Overleaf for many reasons! The most important one is simply because I work offline quite often (or with very limited internet). Sometimes I write papers in a forest (the forest around MPIK is so nice:-), and recently, before the internet at my new home in Brussels is installed, I don’t think I will have a better internet connection than my 4GB/month Belgian SIM card. Despite my preference for offline editing (Dropbox is also perfect), there are projects I have to work on using Overleaf. So I need an offline approach!

Git an Overleaf project

Now Overleaf supports the git integration!

The simplest solution:

git clone https://git.overleaf.com/xxxx

in a local working folder. Here xxxx is the lengthy project ID on Overleaf, which usually looks like, e.g.,

5e48a1234567490001a31759

This ID can be obtained by checking the link of your Overleaf project. For example, if the link is

https://www.overleaf.com/project/5e48a1234567490001a31759

then xxxx should be the part after “www.overleaf.com/project/”.

If you’re not familiar with git …

There are many tutorials which can be found by google. But you don’t need to go through a complete tutorial. Knowing “git clone”, “git pull”, “git push”, “git commit”, “git add”, “git status” should be enough for basic use of git with Overleaf.