Suggested Prerequisites for Writing LaTeX in Vim

• See the LaTeX project’s official installation instructions for installing LaTeX on various operating systems.

• I recommend the tutorial at learnlatex.org as a starting point for learning LaTeX. Another decent option, despite the clickbait title, is Overleaf’s Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes. Note that you can find hundreds of other LaTeX guides on the Web, but this can be just as overwhelming as it is helpful. Be wary of poorly written or non-comprehensive tutorials, of which there are unfortunately plenty. The LaTeX project’s list of helpful links is a good place to find high-quality documentation and tutorials.

• Installation: Vim should come installed on most of the Unix-based systems this series is written for. Unfortunately the official instructions for installing Vim aren’t particularly inviting to beginners; for installation I suggest using Homebrew on macOS or consulting your distribution’s package manager on Linux.

• And here are the official instructions for installing Neovim (which are much friendlier to beginners than Vim’s instructions). If you are choosing between Vim and Neovim specifically for the purpose of this series, I encourage you to choose Neovim: connecting Neovim to your PDF reader will be easier because of Neovim’s implementation of the remote procedure call protocol.

• To get started with Vim/Neovim, try the interactive Vim tutorial (usually called the “Vim tutor”) that ships with Vim. You access the Vim tutor differently depending on your choice of Vim and Neovim.

  • If you have Vim (or gVim or MacVim) installed: open a terminal emulator and enter vimtutor.
  • If you have Neovim installed: open Neovim by typing nvim in a terminal. Then, from inside Neovim, type :Tutor and press the Enter key to open the Vim tutor.

  After (or in place of) the Vim tutor, consider reading through Learn Vim the Smart Way.

Read through Neovim’s :help vim-differences or read the equivalent online version.

• For most users, I suggest using the well-regarded Vim-Plug plugin to manage your plugins (yes, this is a plugin that manages other plugins). The Vim-Plug GitHub page contains everything you need to get started.

• If you prefer to manage your plugins manually, without third-party tools, use Vim/Neovim’s built-in plugin management system. The relevant documentation lives at :help packages but is unnecessarily complicated for a beginner’s purposes. When getting started with the built-in plugin system, it is enough to perform the following:

  1. Create the folder pack inside your root Vim configuration folder (i.e. create ~/.vim/pack/ if using Vim and ~/.config/nvim/pack/ if using Neovim).
  2. Inside pack/, create an arbitrary number of directories used to organize your plugins by category (e.g. create pack/global/, pack/file-specific/, etc.). These names can be anything you like and give you the freedom to organize your plugins as you see fit. You probably just want to start with one plugin directory, e.g. pack/plugins/, and create more if needed as you plugin collection grows.
  3. Inside each of the just-created organizational directories, create a directory named start/ (you will end up with e.g. pack/plugins/start/).
  4. Clone a plugin repository from GitHub into a start/ directory.

  Since that might sound abstract, an example shell session used to install the VimTeX, UltiSnips, and Vim-Dispatch plugins (all used later in this series) using Vim/Neovim’s built-in plugin system would look like this:

  # Change directories to the root Vim config directory
  cd ~/.vim         # for Vim
  cd ~/.config/nvim  # for Neovim
  
  # Create the required package directory structure
  mkdir -p pack/plugins/start
  cd pack/plugins/start
  
  # Clone the plugins' GitHub repos from inside `start/`
  git clone https://github.com/lervag/vimtex
  git clone https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips
  git clone https://github.com/tpope/vim-dispatch
  

  For orientation, the resulting file structure would be:

  ~/.vim/
  └── pack/
      └── plugins/
          └── start/
              ├── vimtex/
              ├── ultisnips/
              └── vim-dispatch/
  

  The VimTeX, UltiSnips, and Vim-Dispatch plugins would then automatically load whenever Vim starts up.

  If you install a plugin manually, its documentation will not be automatically available with Vim’s :help command. To generate the plugin documentation, first ensure the plugin has a doc directory, which is where documentation should be stored. If a plugin doc directory exists, you can generate its documentation with the Vim command:

  :helptags /path/to/plugin/doc
  

  You can also just use :helptags ALL to generate documentation for all plugins with a doc directory; see :help helptags for background.

The Vim documentation is hyperlinked, and if you have syntax highlighting enabled, clickable hyperlinks to help chapters and sections should be clearly highlighted. The following two key combinations will help you navigate the Vim help files:

• Press <Ctrl>] (i.e. the control key and the right square bracket) with your cursor over a highlighted documentation section to jump to that section.
• Press <Ctrl>o (the control key and the lowercase o) to jump backward through your navigation history (e.g. to return to your original position before pressing <Ctrl>]).

For more information, read :help 01.1, which explains the basics of the Vim documentation, and :help notation, which explains the notation used in the Vim documentation.

If you use Windows, I suggest you follow along with the series as is—aside from the PDF reader article, most of the series will be directly applicable and you should still find plenty of helpful techniques and ideas. But you will need to find another resource for PDF reader integration on Windows—I suggest the VimTeX documentation.

If you use some exotic flavor of Unix, I assume you know enough of what you are doing to adapt this series’s Linux-based suggestions to your platform.

I suggest installing Python using your distribution’s package manager on Linux and using Homebrew on macOS. Both of these options should give you a reliable, up-to-date version of Python that includes pip. If you discover that you have multiple, conflicting installations of Python on your system (this is risk on macOS in particular, which ships an outdated version by default), refer to one of the many guides on the Internet for cleaning up a Python 3 installation on your operating system.

In any case, you should end up with the python/python3 and pip/pip3 commands available from a command line.

I tentatively assume that someone interested in using a command line editor like Vim is already familiar with the command line. But in case you need practice, search YouTube or the wider Internet for one of the many guides on getting started with the command line.

Use your distribution’s package manager on Linux and the Homebrew package manager on macOS.

The abbreviations you should know for this series are:

• ~ (the tilde) is shorthand for the home directory
• . is shorthand for the current working directory
• .. is shorthand for one directory above the current working directory
• * is the match-all wildcard character used in glob patterns.

• “e.g.” means “for example”; it is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase exemplī grātiā, which means “for the sake of an example”. For more information consult Wiktionary or the Internet.

  Example:

  The VimTeX function vimtex#syntax#in_mathzone() returns 1 if the cursor is inside a LaTeX math zone (e.g. inside an equation environment or between inline math $ $ symbols) and 0 otherwise.

  Equivalent meaning, using “for example”:

  The VimTeX function vimtex#syntax#in_mathzone() returns 1 if the cursor is inside a LaTeX math zone (for example inside an equation environment or between inline math $ $ symbols) and 0 otherwise.

• “i.e.” means “that is” and is usually used as a clarification of a previous statement; it is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase id est, which, surprise surprise, means “that is”. For more information consult Wiktionary or search the Internet.

  Example:

  The VimTeX shortcuts [* and ]* let you move between the boundaries of LaTeX comments (i.e. any text beginning with %)

  Equivalent meaning, using “that is”:

  The VimTeX shortcuts [* and ]* let you move between the boundaries of LaTeX comments (that is any text beginning with %)