[Tex/LaTex] your favorite vi or vim command trick

vim

I just saw a similar question about Emacs/AUCTeX so this one was coming. I use nvi for all my editing including TeX and it would not change it for anything. However, even after almost 20 years of use I never stop to be amazed by clever trick people show me of and on.

This is my favorite list of nvi tricks (to be edited and improved over next couple of days):

1) Do not forget to use key mappings! Don't forget also that the whole power of Unix is on your fingertips as there is nothing easier than to invoke shell commands in nvi. Combination of this two ideas is very potent.

a) Even though nvi has no built in spell checker it doesn't mean that we can't do a spell checking. Actually it is even easier than in most "user friendly editors". This is the most useful line in my .exrc for TeX editing.

map v :w^M:!ispell %^M:e!^M^M

The spell checking is done by pressing ESC+v. Note that people who prefer aspell over ispell can put something like

map v :w^M:!aspell check  %^M:e!^M^M

b) Another useful keyboard mapping specifically for TeX users. 

map ^X :w^M:!make pdf clean %^M^M

What is does it enables you to tex your most recent edit by pressing Ctrl+X which pending on your pdf-viewer is automatically updated. Almost WYSIWYG for nvi users. Ok for people who want to add this into their .exrc files note that tex-ing is actually done with make utility. So I do have my own home cooked Makefile in my working directory. Targets pdf and clean are described in the Makefile.

2) nvi comes with pretty sensible sets of default values. However a carefully crafted .exrc can dramatically increase productivity of editing. This is my complete .exrc.

set autoindent
set autoprint
set cedit=^[
set extended
set file=^[
set number
set ruler
set shiftwidth=4
set showmatch
set showmode
set tabstop=8
set verbose
set wrapmargin=8

map V !}fmt -w 72 ^M
map v :w^M:!ispell %^M:e!^M^M
map ^X :w^M:!make pdf clean-ps %^M^M

Probably two of the most underappreciated options which were not present in the original vi editor are extended option which allows you to use extended regular expressions (think egrep) and cedit=^[ (^[ which is ESC in the verbose mode) allows you to use command history in ex mode.

There are two other options which I do not have in my .exrc file but I find it very useful. By default nvi search is case sensitive. We can override this behavior by setting option ignorecase (ic). Since I tend to use extended regular expressions this is not essential feature for me. Second non default option which is very useful is incremental search. Just set searchincr
and you will see what nvi matches words as you type in each letter of your search string.

3) Using abbreviations coming soon.

4) Buffers, markers and similar coming soon

5) Batch editing for beginners coming soon.

Edit:

This edit is inspired by Stefan Kottwitz comment. My favorite thread on vi/vim from stackexchange is "What is your most productive shortcut with VIM?". I almost fall of the chair after reading the first answer "Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi".

Best Answer

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.vim aims to be an unobtrusive, concise vim script 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.vim is 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 runtimepath with ease. In practical terms, pathogen.vim makes it super easy to install plugins and runtime files in their own private directories.

Hope it helps. :)

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