LaTeX is the de facto standard tool for writing academic papers. When working with groups I generally find myself using Share LaTeX . Share LaTeX is a great way to collaborate Google Docs-style one a LaTeX document, and it has a very forgiving compiler that in general seems to get things right. As is the case with so many other things, however: editing LaTeX is better with Vim.
Until recently I’d been using Latex-Box for some pretty nifty vim functionality. Recently I began looking for a way to do things like autocomplete citations. In my search for how to do this I came across an alternative plugin called vimtex , made by one of the same people behind LaTeX-Box.
Overall vimtex is a straight upgrade over LaTeX-Box. Here is some of the functionality I’ve been enjoying.
Linting and syntax checking runs on save. It will include helpful resolution suggestions, which is a huge improvement even over Share LateX, which seems to prefer just swallowing errors.
The document can be compiled with <leader>ll. In LaTeX-Box this command just
issued a compile command that would hang the editor until it completed. With
vimtex it starts “continuous mode”, which means that on every save the document
is compiled asynchronously. If you open the resulting PDF with a browser like
Skim
and enable auto-reloading, you can
watch your document compile on every save. Homebrew users can install Skim with
brew cask install skim.
A table of contents showing sections and subsections is shown with
<leader>lt. The table of contents can be navigated using j and k and
jumped to by pressing enter.
Environments (like begin{enumerate}) can be closed using ]]. In LaTeX-Box I
had to add special macro that applied only to .tex files for this to work.
Not so with vimtex.
Several other changes make editing with vimtex more enjoyable.
I like wrapping my text at 79 characters. This is mostly due to the fact that I
started putting a text column alert at 80 rather than 81, and as a consequence
I’d been wrapping all my files to 79 characters. It just so happens this also
follows the
official Python
guidelines
, so I ended up leaving
it at 79 rather than fixing it. To get text to autowrap at 79 characters in vim
I have the following my .vimrc:
set wrap
set textwidth=79
With that addition I can type normally and vim wraps the text for me, letting me ignore line breaks. Before that I would try and guess when a word would make a line too long. It was miserable.
A companion operator to this is gw. gw re-wraps text and leaves it where it
was when the command was issued (as opposed to gq). After I edit a paragraph
I frequently fire off a gwap, which will re-wrap the paragraph containing my
cursor. This lets me edit with impunity and keep the pretty wrapping that makes
the source legible. One downside of this is that git frequently will show that
I’ve changed a whole paragraph when I’ve really deleted or added a word and
re-wrapped. This doesn’t bother me too much, however, as it’s hard to see
word-based diffs when shown at the line level anyways.
Another nicety is using
YouCompleteMe
for completion.
Setting up YCM can be tricky, but after it’s in place it is very nice (check
the README for good instructions). YCM loads by default whenever I start vim.
It can be annoying when typing text, as it suggests something for every word,
which I find distracting. I’ve added these lines to my .vimrc, which let me
use <leader>y to turn off YCM auto completing every single word:
" Turn off YCM
nnoremap <leader>y :let g:ycm_auto_trigger=0<CR>
" Turn on YCM
nnoremap <leader>Y :let g:ycm_auto_trigger=1<CR>
Generally when I open a .tex file I first press <leader>y to turn off YCM.
If I need it back, it’s a simple <leader>Y.
The real power of YCM and vimtex comes from completing things like \label and
\cite commands. With YCM plugged in correctly, I’m able to type
\cite{designing internet, press <C-space> and have YCM search my .bib
file to suggest completions based on title and author. This is a huge time
saver and keeps me from having to switch back and forth between different files
to add citations. The only thing needed to get this to work is adding a few
lines to your .vimrc indicating what contextual triggers should trigger YCM.
The vimtex documentation includes this with Help command: :h vimtex-complete-youcompleteme.
This reports that you should add this to your .vimrc:
if !exists('g:ycm_semantic_triggers')
let g:ycm_semantic_triggers = {}
endif
let g:ycm_semantic_triggers.tex = [
\ 're!\\[A-Za-z]*cite[A-Za-z]*(\[[^]]*\]){0,2}{[^}]*',
\ 're!\\[A-Za-z]*ref({[^}]*|range{([^,{}]*(}{)?))',
\ 're!\\hyperref\[[^]]*',
\ 're!\\includegraphics\*?(\[[^]]*\]){0,2}{[^}]*',
\ 're!\\(include(only)?|input){[^}]*',
\ 're!\\\a*(gls|Gls|GLS)(pl)?\a*(\s*\[[^]]*\]){0,2}\s*\{[^}]*',
\ 're!\\includepdf(\s*\[[^]]*\])?\s*\{[^}]*',
\ 're!\\includestandalone(\s*\[[^]]*\])?\s*\{[^}]*',
\ ]
With this you can use <C-space> to complete things like citations. Everything
that can be autocompleted is shown in the above command if you unpack it.