PhilT_eX

With the advent of a new school year (at a new school), I’ve fallen away from the PhilT_eX blog and forum much more than I would’ve liked. But I’m back for another, much shorter, install­ment in my ongo­ing series on con­fig­ur­ing Vim for use as a L^aT_eX editor.

One of my favorite plu­g­ins for Vim is snip­Mate. Snip­Mate is great for L^aT_eX, but it comes in handy any time I use Vim—be it for tex­tile, mark­down, emails in mutt, and so on.

The basic idea is sim­ple: snip­Mate gives you both default and cus­tom filetype-specific word or phrase com­ple­tions. So when I am writ­ing in a .tex file, if I type sec and then a TAB I get the following:

\section{Section Name} % {{{
\label{sec:Section Name}
% section Section Name }}}

What is more, the first occurence of ‘Sec­tion Name’ is high­lighted. If I start typ­ing it gets replaced with my title. Another <TAB> takes me to the sec­ond occurence of ‘Sec­tion Name’, and a third takes me to the blank space before the end of the sec­tion so I can start writing.

The default snip­pets are great and are really help­ful. But the real power comes in the fact that you can cus­tomize snip­pets really eas­ily. All you do is edit (or cre­ate) a filetype.snippets file for your file­type. An exam­ple will make this more clear.

I like to use the \citet{} and \citep{} com­mands for cita­tions fre­quently. But I don’t want to type that every time. So I put the fol­low­ing in my tex.snippets file

# citations
snippet cpp
    \citep[${1:pp}]{${2:key}}${3}
snippet cp
    \citep{${1}}${2}
snippet ctt
    \citet[${1:pp}]{${2:key}}${3}
snippet ct
    \citet{${1}}${2}

This means that cpp<TAB> will give me \citep[pp]{key}. The cur­sor will be on the ‘pp’, and when I type a page num­ber it will write over that, a <TAB> will move the cur­sor to ‘key’, where I can write in my cite key, and a third <TAB> will move the cur­sor imme­di­ately after the clos­ing bracket.

In gen­eral, if you want to write a com­mand, you fol­low this formula:

snippet shortcut_key
  \command_you_want{${1}}

You can have as many tab stops as you want, so far as I can tell: just put ${1} for the first, and so on. If you want some text to be high­lighted (so you can type over it) when you get to that tab stop, do a ${1:your text}.

You can do basi­cally any­thing you want here (except lead with a pound sign (#), since that is the com­ment leader for .snip­pets files). You could do a sig­na­ture or a para­graph or a long series of com­mands. If you want to set your L^aT_eX foot­notes off like this:

 end of line.%
%
%
\footnote{my note.}%
%
%

you can. The world is your oyster.

I have redone some com­mands (e.g., to do man­ual sec­tion folds on {{{ }}}), and have writ­ten an hand­ful of addi­tional snip­pets for my .tex files. Feel free to check them out on this page of my github account. If you want to look at all my snip­pets, you can find them one direc­tory up in that account

Note:

To be fair, I think I’m using an out­dated ver­sion of this plu­gin. Nev­er­the­less, it doesn’t work per­fectly for me. Some­times the tab stops get messed up and don’t put my cur­sor in the right place. It isn’t a big deal for me, but be warned that it might happen.

Even with the occa­sional prob­lem, I think snip­Mate makes my writ­ing life much eas­ier. I com­mend it to you, if you use Vim.