Vim Latex

Intro

Originally I wanted to explain how to install support for the type setting system latex in the vastly superior text editor vim. The internet tells you that this comes in the form of a plugin called latex-vim, so you need a plugin manager for vim.

Vim and Plugins

Once upon a time, people using vim had to simply copy their plugins into the folder ~/.vim/. This made management of plugins a pain in the ass, since it was virtually impossible to remove already installed plugins or debug plugins. The story goes that some clever guys decided to write a plugin-manager for vim, which is perversely another plugin. It is called pathogen and you need to install it, before moving on to installing the plugins.

How it really works

I found out, that all of this is a lie. In all useful operating systems, you can simply install vim-latex with the package manager of your choice. This is an easy and painless process. In my case (Fedora 22), the plugins live somewhere in /usr/share/vim/vimfiles. But in fact I do not care. All I care about is, that it works.

So, why did it take me so long to install vim-latex? Because I thought, that it did not work. I tried all the handy shortkeys from the documentation and they did nothing. The problem was that vim did not understand that I was in fact editing tex-files. He thought, that the filetype was ‘plaintex’ instead of ‘tex’. Turns out, that there was a single line missing in my ~/.vimrc.

let g:tex_flavor='latex'

With this, everything works. At least on my machine.