Leaving vim-latex for rubber and ultisnips

Update: I actually use latexmk now instead of rubber, since it already ships with texlive and has all the features of rubber (and then some). The latexmk command (analogous to the rubber command below) is latexmk -pdf file.tex, or in vim, :w<CR>:!latexmk -pdf %<CR>.

Several years ago when I started using vim, I needed a way to integrate \(\LaTeX{}\) and stumbled on the hugely popular vim-latex plugin. It comes with a ton of bells and whistles, like automatic text replacement, shortcuts for inserting environments, and macros for compiling tex code and for opening the resulting pdf in your favorite viewer. Also, for users of graphical vim, vim-latex adds a ton of new menus that list various environments, commands, packages and their options, etc.

Over the years, however, I’ve realized that I don’t actually use any of the features other than the two macros above, plus a few basic text replacements and environment shortcuts. In fact, some of the features can be quite annoying and (as far as I’ve been able to learn) are not easily disabled. For example, if I want to write an expression in single quotes that starts with ‘a’, such as ‘arm’, the moment I type `a, the replacement mechanim kicks in and replaces it with \alpha. And similar for a bunch of other character combinations.

So the other day, I finally decided to get rid of vim-latex all together and write my own macros for compiling and viewing. Initially, I was just going to use pdflatex, but then I remembered about the awesome rubber, a program for handling “all tasks related to the compilation of LaTeX documents”. That especially means compiling multiple times to fix labels as well as doing the whole

$ pdflatex
$ bibtex
$ pdflatex
$ pdflatex

runaround. As expected, rubber also comes with a slew of options and can compile to any of the usual formats.

Here are the two macros I wrote:

" LaTeX (rubber) macro
nnoremap <leader>c :w<CR>:!rubber --pdf --warn all %<CR>

" View PDF macro; '%:r' is current file's root (base) name.
nnoremap <leader>v :!mupdf %:r.pdf &<CR><CR>

The first macro (mnemonic: compile) saves the current file and then runs rubber --pdf --warn all on it, which compiles to pdf using pdflatex and shows all warnings and errors.

The second macro (mnemonic: view) opens the current tex file’s pdf file in mupdf. The sequence %:r returns the root of the current filename, i.e., with the last extension removed (same as GNU/Linux basename).

If you only want these macros to be available when editing a tex file, then group them into an augroup:

" LaTeX macros for compiling and viewing
augroup latex_macros " {
    autocmd!
    autocmd FileType tex :nnoremap <leader>c :w<CR>:!rubber --pdf --warn all %<CR>
    autocmd FileType tex :nnoremap <leader>v :!mupdf %:r.pdf &<CR><CR>
augroup END " }

I like this method because I have other compiling and viewing macros for other filetypes, such as a macro that converts markdown to html with pandoc. I can use the same <leader>c binding, and vim knows which macro to run based on the filetype of the document I’m writing.

And there are other ways of creating sweet vim/latex harmony without vim-latex. For example, for text replacement, I’ve started experimenting with ultisnips (influenced by, but by now better than, snipmate). It ships with a few handy LaTeX snippets, and it’s super easy to write new ones (or snippets for any filetype).

I’ve also started using surround, which vastly simplifies the inserting, changing, and deleting of “surroundings”, e.g., ), }, ", etc.

Hopefully in the near future I’ll write up a more detailed post about my new vim + latex (sans vim-latex) workflow.