djot VS ultisnips

I know this doesn't solve your problem directly, but I recommend people to try out Djot[0], a markup language from the author of CommonMark.

Djot has a single well-defined spec, and most of the basic formatting has the same syntax as (a) Markdown, so switching is pretty painless. It has as a main goal to be legible and visually aesthetic as-is, just like Markdown.

What Djot adds is its _predictability_. Nested formatting, precedence order, line breaks behavior, nested blocks, mixed inline and block formatting, custom attributes are all laid out precisely in the spec in a thought-out manner. Till this day I still can't remember how to put line break within a list item in Markdown (and I'm sure there're more than one way).

[0]: https://djot.net/

Worth noting that the author has also created a markup language, djot.

https://github.com/jgm/djot

Every time I see people doing something with Markdown, I wish they just replace it with support for Djot[0] instead. It is a Markdown alternative by the creator of Pandoc and CommonMark that fixes all of the most egregious mistakes, while being legible and visually pleasant as-is. It is also syntactically similar to Markdown, which should ease adoption.

[0] https://github.com/jgm/djot

Are you using markdown? It might make sense to look at 'djot' as well: https://djot.net/; it's a new 'light' markup language conceived as a successor to commonmark; development is led by none other than John McFarlane (author of pandoc, & also led commonmark standardization) Djot makes it really easy to attach arbitrary attributes to block elements as well as inline elements; and the parser records source positions in the output -- all of which makes it really convenient keeping track of elements changing position or value.

I have a simple script that sends a djot buffer (https://github.com/jgm/djot) to the parser, if there's a change, on the CursorHold event.

Since you mentioned you were considering moving to CommonMark, have you had time to look into Djot (also by jpm)? Djot is meant to be easier to parse, and I'm planning to write a tree-sitter grammar for it.

Another recent development here is https://djot.net/ (by the pandoc author). It indeed thoroughly solves both:

I always like people's LaTeX-based note taking setups. I'm a mathematician, so I write a lot of LaTeX too. (And I use vim, so I really like vim+Latex workflows).

It's interesting that this post (or rather, the later post that discusses this) talks about the advantages of UltiSnips. The well-known vim-LaTeX posts written by Gilles Castel (RIP) relied pivotally on UltiSnips.

It's not just that UltiSnips is a snippet engine. There are many of those (including LuaSnip, the other snippet engine mentioned in the OP series of articles). It's that UltiSnips can dispatch arbitrary expressions to short python code sections, and python has a great scientific library. For example, it's trivial to write a `sympy` snippet that will simplify or compute a given expression and write the output in latex for you.

But UltiSnips works *terribly* with neovim [1] [2]. Why? Because UltiSnips uses python, and neovim's python interface is 100x slower than vim's python interface. There are design decisions for this and I'm not trying to say that neovim is bad. I use both vim and neovim. But I use vim+UltiSnips+vimtex for writing LaTeX.

LuaSnip has interpolation too. I suppose it would be possible to write more code that calls from LuaSnip to a system like sympy (or other). But that's work. On the other hand, I think it takes a true power user to actually want or use the fancy interpolation functions.

[1]: https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips/issues/974

I think in-the-wild examples like Ultisnips deoplete semshi (although they are advanced and somewhat complex) would also be good examples to learn how one can use python for writing plugins.

I didn't know lsp-zero, but this integration seems just for me except for that I am using UltiSnips instead of luasnip. Just curious how difficult do you think it is to add UltiSnips integration along with cmp-nvim-ultisnips?

If you use UltiSnips, you can just do this:

Snipets or code completion can be done in a number of different ways, and how that is configured will depend on what method you use. In the blog he uses the vim plugin ultisnips. You'll find details on configuration for that in that link.

Heyo, I've been trying to get UltiSnips and YouCompleteMe to work, however, I've ran into a bit of a problem. The python36.dll library does not seem to exist for UltiSnips, and YouCompleteMe cannot locate python at all (screenshots at bottom).