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Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

piotrkazmierczak.com

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Re: Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

#32

Post by pmoriarty »

scorpion032 wrote: post #31

The best LaTeX editor I have found is [Latexian]( http://tacosw.com/latexian/ ) In a discussion on Latex Editors, I find it surprising how it was not mentioned even, so far.

Could you elaborate on that? What makes it the best for you? More to the point, in what ways is it better than AucTEX?

Re: Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

#35

Post by dredmorbius »

I'm seeing a lot of "X is best" or "y additional feature is powerful".

Neither adds much to the discussion.

Which isn't to say that posts such as this can't provide value. I've been using vim and its antecedents for over a quarter century, as well as well over another editors and authoring tools (closer to two dozen). Including a few forays into emacs-land.

I find discussions of tools useful, and have added a few to my own suite in the past year. Most recently vim-outliner, an outlining plug-in for vim, also Pandoc, and in the past two years, for the first time after considering it for a long time, LaTeX.

Describing WHY an editor or tool suits you, or SPECIFIC features it has or offers, is far more useful.

It will also make the discussion here hugely more valuable than just pointing people at vim or emacs (again). Both are pretty easy to find without that help.

Providing reasons and specific benefits -- much more valuable.

Re: Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

#36

Post by dredmorbius »

diarg wrote: post #33

Indeed, Emacs rocks for LaTeX. It would rock harder is someone(tm) implemented a visual version of LaTeX, for small quick documents and for newbie accessibility.

There's Lyx, though I've long found it harder to deal with than straight-up LaTeX.

If you're doing quick small documents, Markdown and Pandoc may well be a better fix for you.

A useful mode for working with LaTeX (or other tagged documents) is to have a build system which watches your source, re-builds it as you edit it, and a viewer which updates as the generated PDF is refreshed.

You can do this with LaTeX, Markdown + Pandoc, or numerous other systems. It's quite powerful.

Re: Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

#37

Post by JoshTriplett »

pmoriarty wrote: post #26
JoshTriplett wrote: post #18

I switched to vim years ago for everything else, but I still use emacs specifically for auctex. I have yet to find a vim equivalent nearly as convenient. In particular, C-c C-c as a do what I mean compiler (checking timestamps to figure out whether to run LaTeX, BibTeX, etc, as well as C-c C-e to insert an environment, and alt-enter to insert a newline and \item.

I just use snippets (via xptemplate) to do LaTeX editing in vim. For running LaTeX, BibTeX, pdftex, etc, I use LatexMk.[1] I would be interested to hear what AucTEX provides that the above combination can't. [1] - http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LatexMk

I don't find snippets nearly as convenient as the built-in auctex keybindings. C-c C-e itemize item1 item2 gives me (properly indented for surrounding context):

    \begin{itemize}
    \item item1
    \item item2
    \end{itemize}
I could probably convince vim to do that, but auctex does it out of the box with no additional configuration required.

Likewise, I could probably set makeprg to latexmk or rubber or some other DWIM script, but that ought to Just Work as easily as auctex's C-c C-c, and shouldn't require a pile of configuration.

I haven't even found a way to bind in vim's insert mode, because vim can't distinguish that from .

Re: Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

#38

Post by pmoriarty »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #37
pmoriarty wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just use snippets (via xptemplate) to do LaTeX editing in vim. For running LaTeX, BibTeX, pdftex, etc, I use LatexMk.[1] I would be interested to hear what AucTEX provides that the above combination can't. [1] - http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LatexMk

I don't find snippets nearly as convenient as the built-in auctex keybindings. C-c C-e itemize item1 item2 gives me (properly indented for surrounding context): \begin{itemize} \item item1 \item item2 \end{itemize} I could probably convince vim to do that, but auctex does it out of the box with no additional configuration required. Likewise, I could probably set makeprg to latexmk or rubber or some other DWIM script,…

In vim, using xptemplate:

  itemitem1item2
results in exactly the same thing. True, I had to spend 5 minutes writing a snippet to do that,[1] but that was because the default snippet behaved differently (though arguably just as intuitevely).

xptemplate comes with a bunch of LaTeX snippets (and ones for about 50 other languages), but it's easy enough to add more yourself, especially when the desired behavior is as simple as you describe. It gets trickier when you have lots of nested snippets, menus, conditionals, etc. But the tools are there as features, and you don't have to write the features themselves yourself, just use them.

As for latexmk, depending on how complex your needs are, you may not have to configure it, just run it. A "latexmk -pdf foo.tex" will probably do what you want. Configuring it or using other/more options give you more control, which is a good thing. AucTeX, by the way, has a latexmk plugin.

[1] - It would have gone a lot faster had it not been a couple of years since I wrote an xptemplate snippet.

Re: Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

#39

Post by JoshTriplett »

pmoriarty wrote: post #38
JoshTriplett wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find snippets nearly as convenient as the built-in auctex keybindings. C-c C-e itemize item1 item2 gives me (properly indented for surrounding context): \begin{itemize} \item item1 \item item2 \end{itemize} I could probably convince vim to do that, but auctex does it out of the box with no additional configuration required. Likewise, I could probably set makeprg to latexmk or rubber or some other DWIM script,…

In vim, using xptemplate: item item1 item2 results in exactly the same thing. True, I had to spend 5 minutes writing a snippet to do that,[1] but that was because the default snippet behaved differently (though arguably just as intuitevely). xptemplate comes with a bunch of LaTeX snippets (and ones for about 50 other languages), but it's easy enough to add more yourself, especially when the desired behavior is as sim…

> While on the subject of configuration, if you are not a fan of configuring your editor, I'm not sure I understand what you're doing using Emacs.

I don't mind configuring something when I actually want to change its behavior, but I'm a big fan of sensible and helpful defaults that Just Work. I'm not complaining that there isn't a vim mode that works exactly like auctex out-of-the-box; I'm annoyed that there doesn't seem to be one that has equivalent functionality out-of-the-box. I could reinvent it using templates/snippets, but I didn't have to do so with auctex.

> As for latexmk, depending on how complex your needs are, you may not have to configure it, just run it. A "latexmk -pdf foo.tex" will probably do what you want.

I understand that I wouldn't have to configure latexmk (or rubber, or any number of other DWIM scripts for LaTeX), but I'd still need to configure vim to use one of them and have a convenient keybinding for them. I'd also prefer not to rely on an external script; I'd rather have something built into vim and configurable within vim.

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