latex-snippets VS dotfiles

Though I'm not the same commenter, I personally got over the curve by learning from the LaTeX-tutorial.com website recommended by my professor of a math course, and then by learning how to use the Vim text editor with LaTeX. I also took a math course that happened to required weekly problem sets to be submitted in LaTeX.

The first stage of learning was to learn LaTeX with from the website LaTeX-Tutorial.com, which includes a tutorial with no paywall [1]. I paid the closest attention to tutorials 00 to 05 for the core functionality, then skimmed the rest of the tutorial, as I would only rarely use the remaining features. (For tables, even after gaining a general familiarity with how the tabular environment work, I still found it faster to use the Tables Generator website [3], which was also recommended by my instructor).

I then gained practice using TeXstudio as I preferred an offline program, though my professor and most of my fellow students used Overleaf as an online editor. However, I found that I spent a lot of time transcribing handwritten problem sets into LaTeX documents on TeXstudio and Overleaf, and searched for a faster and more pleasant method (in particular, I found that there was a significant delay in my experience when compiling LaTeX code to a PDF with TeXstudio and Overleaf).

That was the source of my motivation for learning how to use Vim with LaTeX, though you should have enough knowledge for effectively writing LaTeX documents with just the information from the LaTeX tutorial website. I was also motivated due to my curiosity about Vim in general, from past discussions on the text editor in an xkcd comic and various forum discussions.

To begin the learning process for Vim, I completed the default-installed Vim tutorial (also motivated because I was curious about Vim in general, from past discussions on the text editor in an xkcd comic and various forum discussions) over a weekend day. Crucially, I followed most of the advice from a Hacker Noon article [4] about more efficient ways to scroll up and down. I then edited the .vimrc config file to allow for using the cursor to keep things simple, using most of the default configurations for Neovim.

Then, I roughly followed E.J. Mastnak's guide at [1] to get set up, over the course of another weekend day. After some troubleshooting with the configuration, I finally got the setup to work, and I’ve happily been using Vim with LaTeX since then. Since the process reduced the friction to compile LaTeX code to a PDF, I compiled my document more often, so I could catch errors early and often (I rarely spend time troubleshooting and debugging LaTeX code now, since I now fix errors shortly very after they appear, as I compile the document every few lines of code or so).

The main major drawback of using Vim and LaTeX was that I followed the advice to enable autocompletion with snippets (e.g. typing “AA” automatically types in “\forall”) via the the UltiSnips software, which would make substitutions without an audible notification (in contrast to other software that I use to make snippets outside of Vim, that would make an audible ping before a substitution). That led to some significant typos in an early assignment I submitted, and I since learned from my mistake to be far more careful when using Vim with LaTeX for enabling snippets. However, snippets also functioned as a nice learning tool, as I would learn through practice what some basic commands would be, through the auto-substitution (for example, I’ve now easily remembered through exposure that <= is written as `\leq`) in LaTeX.

To conclude, you can use free tutorials to learn the basics of LaTeX, and use Overleaf and TeXstudio to practice. For additional speed and pleasantness, you can spend a couple focused weekend days (or possibly more) to learn how to use Vim with LaTeX following another free guide. Then, you can reinforce your learning through regular practice (in my experience, my regular practice was necessary due to requirements of a math course—if your work or education similarly requires LaTeX, a real-life necessity is a great motivator for practicing document production with LaTeX).

[1] https://latex-tutorial.com/tutorials/

[2] https://www.ejmastnak.com/tutorials/vim-latex/intro/

[3] https://www.tablesgenerator.com

[4] https://hackernoon.com/learning-vim-what-i-wish-i-knew-b5dca...

[5] https://github.com/gillescastel/latex-snippets/blob/master/t...

My ~/.vimrc configuration is just copied from this website https://github.com/gillescastel/latex-snippets

I was trying to use some of Gilles Castel's LaTeX snippets for my own notetaking, which I do on nvim with markdown, using pandoc to convert to pdf. The problem with this is that the tex snippets are designed to be activated only when in LaTeX math, but there's no function to directly check this in the plugin I'm using for pandoc markdown.

1) There's a different plugin based approach for LaTeX if you don't grow to like latex-suite (as I did): vimtex can be used to do the compiling, syntax highlighting, completion, navigating to the right spot in the code or pdf ect, and you can take care of the snippets yourself, either by simply not doing anything and typing everything out (completion aided), using :h :ab or using a snippet plugin (in the case of UltiSnips, a careful review of this would be a boost) 2) "just installing" vim plugins without reading about their features doesn't really add to anything other than the learning curve, because many vim plugins change the way vim works and can only be made useful by knowing about their features. If you just let them sit, many of them won't do anything other than slowing down the program. This might very well be different than in VSC

tex.snippet file i use

Yep I'm using VimTeX + UltiSnips. My configs are https://github.com/g6ai/dotfiles, look into vim directory for VimTeX config and UltiSnips snippets. The \cite{ completion is handled by coc.nvim and its extension coc-vimtex, relevant configs are all in my vimrc there. Any questions are welcome.

Can't really pinpoint your issue, but you can check my tmux.conf because it works for powerlevel10k zsh prompt

My tmux.conf and zsh powerlevel10k settings render like this.

Interestingly, I encountered this problem only in Vim, while Neovim is fine. Of course a workaround is apply !redraw. But I think this might be related to our dotfiles. I won't bother solving this right now, if you are interested here are my dotfiles.

I have experience on this. Basic Vim usage is smooth only if you SSH into it. Any WM is too much for it. Big Vim plugins make it quite laggy, so I'm maintaining my dotfiles that uses a minimal Vim setup for small machine like Zero W.

My own experience is kitty and Alacritty are all fast enough (low enough latency) and do not eat too much system resources. So I think maybe a capability comparison is more useful (common character/glyph display capability, not terminal special) , and I just wrote one here.

Here I summarized some tips on this: https://github.com/g6ai/dotfiles/wiki/vimrc#cursor-setting and https://github.com/g6ai/dotfiles/wiki/inputrc . You could reference my dotfiles here: https://github.com/g6ai/dotfiles