vimvim-latex
I have a LaTeX editing environment that does some assistive stuff such as auto-indenting, closing parentheses, etc.
However, one of the things that it does is unknown to me, and is difficult to search for. If I type an empty set of braces, it replaces them with
{}<++>
If I type two empty sets, for example when I'm setting up a fraction \frac{}{} what I actually get is
\frac\left\{ } \right\}<++>}<++>
Is this a problem? What does <++> do?
Edit: This is using Vim-LaTex / LaTeX-Suite
Disclaimer: I usually edit .tex files in Vim, but I don't use the Vim-LaTeX suite.
I wouldn't say the following suggestions are tricks per se - they are provided by third-party plugins - but they actually help me with my usual TeX workflow:
snipMate 
Created by Michael Sanders
From the manual:
snipMate.vimaims to be an unobtrusive, concisevimscript that implements some of TextMate's snippets features in Vim. A snippet is a piece of often-typed text that you can insert into your document using a trigger word followed by a<tab>.
snipMate helps me a lot, mainly because it offers snippets for several languages out of the box, including TeX. For example, when editing a file mydoc.tex, typing
begin<tab>
will expand to an environment block of the form
\begin{env}
\end{env}
with the cursor selecting the word env. After typing the environment name, hitting <tab> again will take the cursor to
\begin{env}
|
\end{env}
for me to type. The snippets list for TeX is not that big, but the plugin seems to have a fairly easy syntax for us to create custom snippets. Here's the code used to create the above snippet:
# \begin{}...\end{}
snippet begin
\begin{${1:env}}
${2}
\end{$1}
So far, so good.
Tabular Created by Matt Wozniski
From the manual: Sometimes, it's useful to line up text. Naturally, it's nicer to have the computer do this for you, since aligning things by hand quickly becomes unpleasant. While there are other plugins for aligning text, the ones I've tried are either impossibly difficult to understand and use, or too simplistic to handle complicated tasks. This plugin aims to make the easy things easy and the hard things possible, without providing an unnecessarily obtuse interface. It's still a work in progress, and criticisms are welcome.
Tabular helps me a lot when I'm trying to add elements in a tabular environment. It organizes the columns in a human-readable format. Let's suppose we have the following mess entries:
\begin{tabular}{lll}
Hello world & I love ducks & Vim rocks\\
Think of a very long entry & How was your day & Quack!
\end{tabular}
It's quite confusing, but Tabular can help us. I usually enter in Visual mode, select the two rows and then issue
:'<,'>Tabularize /&
and we are done. The new rows now look like
\begin{tabular}{lll}
Hello world & I love ducks & Vim rocks\\
Think of a very long entry & How was your day & Quack!
\end{tabular}
I can also apply :Tabularize /&, but I prefer to delimit my scope. A similar plugin Align can also be used for this purpose, see my answer to Which text editor to make tables scripts human readable.
surround Created by Tim Pope
From the manual:
Surround.vimis all about "surroundings": parentheses, brackets, quotes, XML tags, and more. The plugin provides mappings to easily delete, change and add such surroundings in pairs.
I usually use this plugin when editing source code from other languages. Let's suppose I have the following text enclosed between double quotes:
"Hello world"
By calling cs"', the double quotes are automatically replaced by single quotes. I decided to make a different use of surround, so I took an example from the documentation and adapted to my TeX needs. First of all, I have the following line in my .vimrc:
autocmd FileType tex let b:surround_45 = "``\r''"
Note that 45 is the ASCII code of -. Now I can simply call cs"- and my text
"Hello world"
becomes
``Hello world''
The documentation has a few examples on TeX snippets.
For those who want to try the plugins I listed above, I highly recommend the use of the awesome pathogen plugin created by Tim Pope.
From the manual: Manage your
runtimepathwith ease. In practical terms,pathogen.vimmakes it super easy to install plugins and runtime files in their own private directories.
Hope it helps. :)
Side note for anyone who ends up here looking for the same thing I am:
To disable specific IMAPs, add trivial IMAP commands to the file ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/tex.vim (you may have to create it if it does not exist). For instance,
" Undo some latex-suite macros
call IMAP('()', '()', 'tex')
call IMAP('{}', '{}', 'tex')
call IMAP('[]', '[]', 'tex')
call IMAP('::', '::', 'tex')
call IMAP('{{', '{{', 'tex')
call IMAP('((', '((', 'tex')
call IMAP('[[', '[[', 'tex')
call IMAP('$$', '$$', 'tex')
Best Answer
The Vim-LaTex / LaTeX-Suite for Vim adds these markers automatically and by intension. You can jump to the next such marker using CTRL+J, which removes this marker. The idea is to speed things up by allowing you to jump to the end of the group or environment which was just added. This is also useful for templates where you can add
<+name+>markers which then can be also accessed using the above key combination to insert the content.You should be able to deactivate the auto-insertion of these markers using the command:
let g:Imap_UsePlaceHolders = 0