I have been working on making editing PreTeXt documents inside a GitHub codespace better. Sorry for those of you who have run into problems in the last few weeks. But I'm happy to say things should be much better now. I hope.
If you would like to update an existing project to use the new codespace, you should be able to run `pretext update`, as long as you are on 2.16.1 (otherwise run `pretext upgrade` or `pip install pretext --upgrade` first).
If you start a new project using the template available at
https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext-codespace, you will be able to start up a codespace almost instantly. It will then install pretext and some LaTeX automatically, but this shouldn't take more than a minute or two. One change is that you will not have a project initially. This way you can run create a project of whatever type you like (article, book, course, slideshow).
Another change: to save on disk space and time to startup, the container now uses TinyTeX with only the latex packages we absolutely need. The sample-article and -book work with what we have, but there might be other packages that we should install as well. If you run into issues, post them on this issue:
https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext-codespace/issues/21.
Sagemath is no longer installed by default, but it should be easy to add it. There is a new command in VS Code that will automate this. Search the command palette for "PreTeXt: Install SageMath".
Oscar.