Welcome

Contributions, suggestions, and requests are welcome: benji@member.AMS.org.

What I actually get done depends, to a large extent, on feedback. I originally planned to spend most of my time on vim and TeX, but I received many more comments on the matchit script than on the TeX macros, so I spent a lot more time on matchit.vim. This is now included in the standard vim distribution (in the $VIMRUNTIME/macros/ directory). More info below.

Contents

• Version 0.03 of my texmacro.vim macros for TeX. These files work with vim 5.x; I am working on a tex ftplugin for vim 6.x. There are now several related files: a user manual (texviman.txt), a configuration file (texvimrc.txt), and an optional extra configuration file, texauto.vim. I also recommend that you get buffoptions.vim, described below. There is also a change log, in case you want to see what is new.
  • My first vim function ever, which converts quotation marks (") automagically into `` or ''. I fixed a bug introduced in the previous version: it got confused by " spaces" and "commas," between the quote marks and the word. TODO: deal with nested quotes.
  • Functions (and menus) to create and view DVI and PDF from the current TeX file
  • Easy entry of LaTeX environments. This is a barely modified form of some scripts written by Ralf Arens. He has posted these on his own web site: see the Links section below.
  • Functions (and menus) to format matrices
  • Specialized stuff that I use: row-reduce a matrix, convert a list of exercise numbers into a bunch of subsection and subsubsection heading.
  • This package is still under development. Let me know what you would like to see added.
• A LaTeX reference written as a vim help file. This is distributed under the GPL. It was translated from a texinfo version (I think) by Mikolaj Machowski. There may be a more recent version at VimOnline. You can use this with vim 6.0 by putting it in the doc/ directory inside your vimfiles dierectory, such as ~/.vim/doc/, and then using the vim command
  :helptags ~/.vim/doc
  (See :help :helptags for detailed instructions.) Then
  :help latex
  will take you to the help file.
• A description of how I get vim to cooperate with MikTeX, the standard TeX distribution for DOS/Windows. For some strange reason, I thought it was a good idea to write it in plain TeX format. Until I get around to changing that, you can read it as a plain text file if you do not have TeX; it should not be too hard.
• If you are using vim 6.x then this is obsolete. A method for making global options act as if they were local to the buffer (only when you want them to be, of course) by Michael Geddes: the script buffoptions.vim and the documentation buffoptions.html.
• This script is now included with the standard distribution of vim 6.x, in the macros/ directory. You can get the version for vim 5.x either here or from VimOnline.
  You can configure % to match almost any regular expressions with matchit.vim, which was started by Raul Segura Acevedo and modified by Douglas Potts and then by me.
  Here are some important features:
  • HTML documentation.
  • Interpret '\@<=' to mean "put the cursor here." This will be useful for constructions like [^d]\s\+\@<=if,end if (but this example is oversimplified).
  • Back references: to match fo with endfo and foo with endfoo and so on, use \<\(fo\+\)\>,\<end\1\>.
  • Allow "backwards" matching with g%.
  • There is an option to treat strings like comments.
  • Currently, the following languages are supported: Ada, Csh, DTD, Entity, Essbase, Fortran, HTML, LaTeX, Pascal, SGML, Shell, Tcsh, Vim, XML.
• Stephen Riehm's bracketing macros for Macintosh and other systems. These provide a way to keep your parentheses (and similar structures) balanced that is much more intelligent than
  :imap ( ().
  Here is the documentation, which is bundled in the archive.
• I have written a little script to automate uploading files using the Nc FTP client. This FTP client has the advantage that it works under Win32 (at least W95) and UNIX. I wrote this before vim 6.0 came out. Even though vim 6.0 has built-in support for ftp, I still find this handy when I want to store upload information in the comments of my files. If you source my script, ncftp.vim, and type :Nw then you will be prompted for a URL and user name; the FTP client handles your password, so it is not echoed to the terminal. The next time you do :Nw it remembers the URL and user name. If you want to automate the process, add a comment line to your file like the UPLOAD line in ncftp.vim (or in the source of this HTML file).
• The file foo.vim is a collection of user-defined vim functions and commands. If you want some examples to get you started, this is for you. I wrote most of these in response to questions posted to the vim mailing list. There are some comments, and a table of contents. (Note that the link above takes you to VimOnline.)
• A copy of my vimrc file, even though there is not much of interest in it. (When I am organized enough, I use this site to keep my vimrc consistent between the W95 box at home and the Mac at the office.)
• Erik Janssen's awk script mktable.awk for prettifying and LaTeXifying tables and his documentation, mktable.txt. This is much fancier than my vim macros. There are also vim scripts that do similar tasks: see Johannes Zellner and Dr. C under the Links section below. One of these days, I may compare these and give a recommendation, but that is low on my priority list.
• Some people like the behavior of some word processors (and some web browser location bars) that they automatically guess how to complete words while you type them. I do not use this much myself, except for testing, but I was intrigued by the challenge. I combine a bunch of Input-mode maps, a menu entry, and the (little used?) Select mode of vim to approximate this behavior. If you like this, (1) let me know and (2) try to get the InsertKeyPost autocommand event off of the todo list and into vim; then this will be much easier to implement and a lot smoother. In the mean time, my word-completion script word_complete.vim checks if you have at least version 5.6 of vim and works a little better if you do, thanks to some bug fixes.

Links

• Vim home page
• Johannes Zellner has several useful vim scripts. In particular, Header.vim will start an empty file with an appropriate template and update time stamps. (For an alternative way to do both of these, see :help template within vim.) He also has a Latex.vim file that should be interesting to German speakers.
• Dr. C (who maintains the tex.vim syntax file) has many useful scripts and programs. Of particular interest for TeX users are the English spell checker and the text-alignment macros. Of general interest: read/write over the net, color schemes, IDE-like features for C/C++.
• Ralf Arens is another LaTeX vimmer. Some of his scripts are incorporated into my texmacro.vim file.

Last modified: 12/27/01