I have been using VIM (actually GVIM) to write papers with LaTeX for almost a decade now. My setup for this has not changed for most of the time. One advantage of using VIM is that once you have learned it, you can expect to use it for a life time.
That been said, a decade seems to be a good time to have an update. So here’s my new VIM setup for LaTeX in 2021 and perhaps for the next decade.
Install plugins
VIM 8 has quite a convenient plugin system vim-plug. Here
are the plugins which I have installed for LaTeX (all codes snippets are from my .vimrc file)
Plug 'neoclide/coc.nvim', {'branch': 'release'}
Plug 'honza/vim-snippets'
Plug 'lervag/vimtex'
Plug 'ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags'
Plug 'airblade/vim-gitgutter'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'Chiel92/vim-autoformat'
COC
I installed coc for auto-completions. The example
configuration on the website works quite well. To make it work better with LaTeX, you should install
the extension coc-texlab.
coc-texlab also provides some extra functions such as basic syntax check. But by default, the parts where there is a warning are marked by an underline. This is confusing as there are many “_” in a math paper. So I chanced to curly underline by
hi default CocUnderline cterm=underline gui=undercurl
<img src="/assets/images/blog/vim-and-latex/coc-texlab.png" style="width:100%; padding:0"></img>
Together with vim-snippets, coc also provides code snippets. To make it work, install coc-snippets. Again the recommended setup works well.
vimtex
vimtex is package which provides some help in editing LaTeX and compling. Install coc-vimtex to make it a source of completion for coc. A nice feature of vimtex is the auto-completion for citations.
<img src="/assets/images/blog/vim-and-latex/vimtex.png" style="width:100%; padding:0"></img>
Other plugins
Two other plugins which I find useful are
- vim-gutentags – Automatically update tags so you can jump to a label easily.
- vim-gitgutter – Some handy git functions.
- vim-surround – This is very useful for editing TeX commands and environments.
- vim-autoformat – Automatically format the whole file with latexindent.
Random labels
Some times I have many equations in a paper and I found it tedious to think names for all of them. So I created a function to generate random labels
" Insert random labels
function! RandomLabel()
python3 << EOF
import random, string, vim
label = ''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_uppercase) for _ in range(4))
vim.command("let @z = '%s'" % label)
EOF
endfunction
vmap ,rl <Esc>:call RandomLabel()<CR>gv"zp
imap ,rl <Esc>:call RandomLabel()<CR>a<C-R>z
More useful tips
The website tex.stackexchange.com is a treasure for all things about LaTeX. It also has some useful tips for using VIM to write LaTeX. Here are some of my favourites