Using vim-latex to Edit Nice Looking Documents

It only shows my academic background when I say that I use Latex for editing anything. From articles to grocery shopping lists, I like the polished result of a Latex document.

And all this started when, in school,  I started using Latex to do my homework. Sure, it used to take a little longer to have it done. But it sure looked much better than doing it by hand.

I always used vim do thinks like Latex editing, after a short period when I used Emacs + Auctex. Although Auctex is a fantastic system, with lots of nice options for Latex users, the simplicity of vim editing always struck me as the right way to do things.

In the last few days, however, I found an open source project that tries to bring many of the features of Auctex to the vim world. It is called vim-latex. From their web page [1]:

We attempt to provide a comprehensive set of tools to view, edit and compile LaTeX documents without needing to ever quit Vim. Together, they provide tools starting from macros to speed up editing LaTeX documents to compiling tex files to forward searching .dvi documents.

See the features page for a brief tour of the various features in LaTeX-suite. All these features can be tuned extensively using the included texrc file.

vim-latex has extensive support for math symbols, folding, Latex compilation, and entering Latex environments. You can compile the whole document, or just parts of it. It makes it easy to visualize what is going on, or fixing problems as they show up.

Even better, vim-latex works on Windows, so I can work on my Latex documents even when I am not working on a Linux box.

Links:

[1] http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/

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About the Author

Carlos Oliveira holds a PhD in Systems Engineering and Optimization from University of Florida. He works as a software engineer, with more than 10 years of experience in developing high performance, commercial and scientific applications in C++, Java, and Objective-C. His most Recent Book is Practical C++ Financial Programming.

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