Overleaf

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 7 threads.

People raised many different problems with Overleaf, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 9 complaints

Multi-second wait for each save once document has figures2025-10-24
Must open the web browser to create or clone projects2024-11-30
Git sync fails or becomes unusably slow when collaborators edit at the same time2024-06-30
Lacks Vim-style text objects, equation entry and formatting tools; PDF preview looks blurry on macOS2024-06-30
Compilation is slow and strange, making the editor feel janky2023-11-21
Commits are all named 'changes on Overleaf', so history is meaningless for review2021-08-08
Slow compilation makes the web app laggy compared to a local editor2021-08-06
Overleaf's UI is unpleasant to use daily, and ShareLaTeX was faster2017-07-20
Everything recompiles every few keystrokes, painful for longer documents on slow connections2015-08-13