LaTeX snippets for Vim and Neovim

Typesetting documents, papers, or letters in LaTeX can be verbose, and error-prone. A bunch of snippets provided in this repository try to reduce this tedium to as low as practicable.

What are snippets and how do they work?

A demo of snippets in action.

latex-snippets-vim.mp4

The concept of a snippet is simple. Think of a block of pre-formatted text (i.e., a template) that one needs to use often. One can of-course type or copy-paste such blocks of text repeatedly the hard way, or one could instead assign such common blocks of text with an abbreviated keyword, which in turn calls the entire block of text. To ensure such blocks do not accidentally appear while typing the actual content of the note, paper, or report, a trigger is required. To illustrate this, see below:

In Vim's insert mode, typing note and hitting tab key on the keyboard inserts the following block, and focuses on the first user input Title in the template. Type the title. To jump to the next placeholder Author, hold ctrl and press j (c-j in Vim parlance). The shortcut to jumping between placeholders can be set in ~/.vimrc file.

%!TeX TS-program = xelatex
%!TeX encoding = utf-8 Unicode
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}

\title{Title}
\author{Author}

\begin{document}

  \maketitle

\end{document}

This repository contains the following snippets:

Snippets	Description
letter + tab	Inserts a letter template
note + tab	Inserts a note template (for XeLaTeX)
toc + tab	Inserts a TOC block
beg + tab	Inserts a begin/end block
sum + tab	Inserts a summary section block
sec + tab	Inserts a section block
sub + tab	Inserts a subsection block
subs + tab	Inserts a subsubsection block
enum + tab	Inserts an enumerate list block
itm + tab	Inserts an itemize list block
it + tab	Inserts an item line
des + tab	Inserts a description list block
par + tab	Inserts a paragraph block
fig + tab	Inserts a figure/label block
tabl + tab	Inserts a table block
ref + tab	Inserts a reference block
bi + tab	Inserts a bib item block
apdx + tab	Inserts an appendix block
pdf + tab	Inserts an includepdf line
// + tab	Inserts a formatted fraction
bf + tab	Inserts bold face tag \textbf{}
em + tab	Inserts emphasize tag \emph{}
sr + tab	Inserts a formatted square
cb + tab	Inserts a formatted cube
compl + tab	Inserts a complement

Requirements

To be able to use snippets, the following are required:

1. Vim or Neovim with python3 support.
2. UltiSnips
3. latex-snippets-vim

Installation

1. Set up vim-plug plug-in manager
2. Set the required UltiSnips plug-in for latex-snippets-vim by adding the following to .vimrc file (see the author's version of .vimrc for reference):

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

" UltiSnips for snippets
Plug 'sirver/ultisnips'

" LaTeX snippets for Vim using UltiSnips (downloads only tagged releases)
Plug 'ckunte/latex-snippets-vim', { 'tag': '*' }

call plug#end()

let g:UltiSnipsExpandTrigger = '<tab>'
let g:UltiSnipsJumpForwardTrigger = '<c-j>'
let g:UltiSnipsJumpBackwardTrigger = '<c-k>'

Reload .vimrc and :PlugInstall to install plug-ins.

Manual installation (not recommended)

Place *.snippets files under, say, ~/.vim/UltiSnips/ (and reload ~/.vimrc with source ~/.vimrc if appropriate). This method is not recommended because then one needs to keep track of updates and will have to manually download and place these whenever snippets are updated.