This page is no longer authoritative, now that TeX Live Utility has a help book. Please use the Help menu to access it.

TeX Live Utility is intended to have very few advanced features, and be as basic as possible. So-called power users are advised to use the command line interface. However, there are a few features that are not for everyday usage.

Reinstall TeX Live Manager

The Actions->Reinstall TeX Live Manager menu item allows you to reinstall the TeX Live infrastructure, including the tlmgr tool. There are rare cases where this may be useful.

Force Remove

If you hold down the option key (alt on some keyboards) while the Actions menu is active, you'll see an option to Forcibly Remove Selected Packages. In general, this is a really bad idea. If you break your TeX Live system by doing this, it's your own fault.

TeX Live Critical Repository

If you hold down the option key (alt on some keyboards) while the Actions menu is active, you'll see an option to Install TeX Live Manager From Critical Repository. This peculiar-sounding item allows you to install the latest TeX Live Manager test version. If you do this, please report any problems encountered to the TeX Live team via the mailing list. In addition, you can revert to a non-beta version of tlmgr by using the Actions->Reinstall TeX Live Manager menu item noted above.

Scheduled Update Checking

You can schedule automatic update checks for TeX Live using Configure->Schedule TeX Live Update Checks…. This will run in the background, using your default repository, and show an alert dialog if new or updated packages are available.

Scheduling is limited to daily or weekly checks. To show the update to any logged-in user, check the “Show alerts to any user” box. Otherwise, each user can schedule update checking separately.

Install TeX Live

MacTeX is the easiest way to install TeX Live on the Mac. However, it requires root access to install. Not all users have administrative privileges, and some may wish to customize their install using the UNIX install script for TeX Live. TeX Live Utility provides a graphical interface to the install script, but you have to enable a command-line preference to use it. Quit TeX Live Utility, then enter the following command in Terminal.app and press Return:

defaults write com.googlecode.mactlmgr.tlu TLMEnableNetInstall 1

When you next launch TeX Live Utility, you should see a third tab, allowing access to various install options. To disable it, repeat the process, replacing 1 with 0 in the Terminal command. To change the install location (TEXDIR) or other variables, you can edit them as shown here, which would install TeX Live in the your home directory:

Note that this will not install the TeX Distribution preference pane or enable switching between MacTeX distributions using the /usr/texbin symlink setup. That is on the list of things to add in future. The default value for all of the variables should be that used by MacTeX, so your custom installation can use the same TEXMFHOME and other locations.