You can very likely wire that up, if you've got a bee in your bonnet to do so. When I was editing latex files regularly, I had an environment something like

You can very likely wire that up, if you've got a bee in your bonnet to do so. When I was editing latex files regularly, I had an environment something like $ make output.pdf $ xpdf -remote projectname output.pdf & while inotifywait -e modify **/* ; do make output.pdf; xpdf -remote projectname -reload; done Then any time I changed a figure or a tex file or an embedded screenshot or whatever (any transitive dependency of output.pdf), make would rebuild it and display the result. xpdf nicely does not change the scroll position (even a little bit), so this gave me a rather nice nearly-real-time WYSIWYG view. My $EDITOR at the time was vim and it never entered my head to try to contrive automatic saving every time I paused typing or something like that, but that seems like a fun idea.