Learning the vi Editor/Vim/External Scripts
One of the strengths of vim is the possibility of using so called vim-scripts (addons) which can be easily installed by copy-and-pasting them into the appropriate directory. A selection of scripts can be found on the official homepage.
The following scripts can illustrate some of possibilities:
LaTeX
[edit | edit source]One powerfull external script is the latex-suite. It supports
- Editing: Latex-Suite ships with a very comprehensive set of insert mode and visual mode mappings and menu items to typeset most of the LaTeX elements.
- Compiling: You can compile the tex file from within vim.
- Viewing: By pressing a key from within vim, the .dvi viewer is started up. You can also do forward and inverse searching on your .dvi file from within vim.
- Folding: Latex-suite ships with the plugin SyntaxFolds.vim which is a plugin for creating "fake" syntax folds on the fly.
- Packages: This module provides ways of customizing the menus based on which packages are being used in the current LaTeX file.
- LaTeX help file: Latex-suite ships with the standard texinfo file translated into vim help format so that you can get help for common latex commands from within vim.
- Dictionary: Latex-suite ships with a dictionary with over 600 LaTeX commands, which speeds up typing using the CTRL-X_d command of vim.
- Customized Templates: Latex-suite ships with some commonly used latex templates.
- Customized Macros: Latex-suite makes it easy to add custom macros, again with the possibility of dynamic content and automatic cursor placement.