digestif VS texlab

1) I believe as a neovim user you have LSP configured, than try digestif. Note: it does not have builtin lspconfig configuration, adding support for digestif is an excercise for the reader ;) Here is some help: lspconfig contribution section

AUCTeX and cdlatex are tried and tested packages in supporting the composition of TeX-documents. However, with the advent of LSP-servers, like TexLab and digestif, there is another (viable?) option to compose TeX-documents.

I’ve tried to follow instructions from digestif (https://github.com/astoff/digestif) but it didn’t work.

The Digestif language server simulates the TeX parsing in a reasonably accurate way, and internally it computes a kind of parse tree. But it doesn't implement all of the LSP editing features, even though this should be a comparatively easy part of the story.

FWIW, the Digestif language server (https://github.com/astoff/digestif) also supports amsrefs.

Helix defaults to texlab so try that?

This is overly verbose and redundant, therefore I disabled eglot-inlay-hints mode in LaTeX and opened and issue: https://github.com/latex-lsp/texlab/issues/858

I have a very limited understanding of Parsing but I would assume that Latex Language Servers have to implement similar parsing too? So maybe check out TexLab. It’s implemented in Rust so maybe it’s an interesting reference.

Is it possible to get a wordcount for LaTeX documents from an LSP like ltex-ls or texlab?

If you’re still stuck you can try reporting an issue here or look for ones similar to yours: https://github.com/latex-lsp/texlab

If you use emacs, I recommend to get some modern goodness by installing lsp-mode (or eglot) to interact with language servers and then install a latex language servers like texlab. This in my expericence really improved the autocompletion so I don't feel like I loose anything over using vscode, texlab or overleaf .Recently I also switched to lsp-ltex for language-tool integration. All those tools lsp servers can also be used from other editors with lsp support, so use what you prefer. I would only recommend emacs to those who want a fully customized and keyboard driven experience and are not afraid to eventually modify some lisp code. But it has its unique advantages, many editing tools and in addition to the still great auctex also cdlatex for super quick math typesetting.

you can use https://github.com/latex-lsp/texlab

I use overleaf these days mostly because overleaf makes it effortless to work across multiple machines. I still have my neovim + texlab [1] setup just in case though.

[1]: https://github.com/latex-lsp/texlab

Story time: I really love Neovim for programming, but one thing I love it even more for is scientific writing. Tools like texlab make this especially fun! But for a well-rounded experience, I need a few more things: (i) Grammar checking. For that I can recommend ltex, an LSP-server which adds LaTeX support to language tool. (ii) Thesaurus lookup. (Neo)vims integrated thesaurus format is a little bit limited. But thankfully 'thesaurusfunc' exists so I could easily write a small plugin to add support for openoffice.org mythes thesauri. (iii) Machine translation. Now we're finally getting to the topic of this post. I write most of my stuff in English but I'm not a native speaker, so machine translation is valuable for me. It can help me to overcome writers block to an extent, for example. There already exist a few plugins for that problem, like vim-translator or translate.nvim. But none of these support interactive modes, a slick UI, and, as far as I know, useful things like motions and counts. This is where my plugin pantran.nvim comes into place! The demo should speak for itself. In the end it was a lot more effort than I anticipated but I'm very pleased with the result. I hope this can be useful to others as well!