Add Evince Forward and Reverse Searching Support to Vimtex?

[gkapfham]

Once again, thanks for all of your efforts in implementing vimtex!

I regularly use this vim plugin to edit large LaTeX documents. I have noticed that vimtex supports forward searching with Zathura and MuPDF --- for those of us who use Linux --- and other viewers for other operating systems. Yet, I regret that I have never been able to get forward or reverse searching to work correctly with these tools.

Would you consider adding forward and reverse searching with evince? This feature works correctly in the Tex-9 plugin. In fact, I have been using both vimtex (for all of the great features that it provides) and Tex-9 (for forward and reverse searching) along with Evince when I have been recently editing LaTeX documents.

With that said, this feature request is not a pressing one! I would much prefer your feedback on and the successful resolution of issues #176, #177, and #178.

Thanks in advance for any insights or new features that you can provide.

[lervag]

I would love to add support for evince. However, it seems evince does not support this from the command line, which makes the implementation much less straightforward. And considering I do not have that much time lately, I think I will leave this for now.

If anyone would be able to provide a very specific recipe for how this can be done, then I might do it. Else I will be happy to consider and accept pull requests.

[lervag]

Thanks, I've already seen TeX-9's approach. However, it is not clear how to extract the minimal amount of code to achieve the evince sync. I've found a couple of things that could help, but I'm not sure how to do it in a vimtex-ish manner.

In the meantime I suggest you try zathura. I much prefer it over evince!

EDIT: The above was a reply to a comment that for some reason was deleted.

[lervag]

Ok, so I've investigated this some more. I see there are several plugins for both vim and other editors that implement support for Evince. However, I find all of the solutions to involve ALOT of code, and it seems like the complexity is high for this simple problem. As I can't find a relatively simple way to implement this, I am sorry to say that I choose to not implement support for evince at this time.

I will consider pull requests, as mentioned. And if anyone will provide a very simple and barebones solution that will be straightforward to implement, then I might consider to implement it myself. In the meantime, I will close this issue with the won't fix-label.

Personally, I think both mupdf, zathura, okular, and qpdfview are good alternatives to evince.

[coxackie]

@lervag Sorry for "necromancing" here; I opened yesterday an issue with evince about better synctex support here. It would be good if you could give your 5 cents there; the devs may be inclined to make some changes and get the situation better, not only for this plugin, but in general.

[lervag]

I'm not sure if I want to register at the Gnome gitlab org to leave a comment. I'm not personally interested in either Gnome nor Evince. But I won't mind collaborating to make Vimtex work better with Evince. If there is an "easy" way to work through dbus from Vim then that might work, else I also think that it would be convenient with command line options as you've suggested (i.e., similar to Zathura).

[coxackie]

ok, thanks, I thought that if you took part maybe it would bring a more constructive element. But, sure, I will keep you posted through here if any developments occur.

[lervag]

Ok, sure; I noticed I did not need to create a new account. I can use my Github account. So I've added an initial comment now and I'll be following the thread.

[davidlowryduda]

In case someone comes across this later, I'll note that I use https://github.com/peterbjorgensen/sved (which adds forward and backward search through dbus) side by side with vimtex. It works well for me.

[lervag]

Feel free to consider if it would be interesting to add some tips to the relevant parts of the docs (e.g. :help vimtex_viewer_evince) - and if so, feel free to suggest changes by PR! :)

[aloispichler]

Thank you for the link, https://github.com/peterbjorgensen/sved.
Works just perfect!

[14mRh4X0r]

I took some time to hack together an Evince view implementation. It doesn't support NeoVIM, and as such I don't think it makes sense to open a PR for it, but it could be used as a basis.

It uses gdbus to interact with Evince through D-Bus. gdbus is part of glib2, so it's almost always installed when Evince is used.