Re: [Vim-latex-devel] Review of vim-latex status

[Mikolaj M. <mi...@wp...>]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 01:11:30PM -0800, Srinath Avadhanula wrote:

Hello,

Sorry for not responding in last weeks but I was cutted off
from e-mail.

> 3. The packages.vim file was robustified. This has not yet been commited
>    to the main branch because I am still waiting to hear from Mikolaj.
>    Actually, not too many changes were made. Just the menu creating code
>    was changed and a function Tex_MakeSubMenu was extracted which will
>    be used in other parts of latex-suite in the future.

I am still on limited computer use. Please merge newpackages branch.
Well done. If you have any improvements in this area let me know.

> 4. Mikolaj added many new packages. Latex-suite now supports 38
>    packages! Support for the amsmath package is really excellent.

Some new are awaiting in home for stabilization of new placeholders
system.

> Things which need to improve
> ============================
> 1. Atleast for me, the diacritics have been a longstanding source of
>    annoyance at unexpected times. Everytime I try doing a=b, I get
>    a\'{b}. And assignments like a=b are so common that this becomes
>    painful pretty fast. I would love to find out a better way to
>    implement support for diacritics. I am in fact thinking of disabling
>    diacritics by default unless we get some better ideas.

diacritics are rarely used. If you need it for your national letters
probably they are built-in in LaTeX and you don't need to play with =b
things. Maybe disable it by default and add switch to turn it on/off?

> Future Directions
> =================
> These are things which are on my "cool things to do" list. Please feel
> free to share your own.
> 1. Dependency checking: i.e, when the user chooses the 'pdf' format,
>    latex-suite automatically compiles the dvi file, converts to ps and
>    then to pdf according to user preferences.

Why? pdflatex thing works good enough. Dvi format has advantage of
possibility of forward/backward searching in dvi viewers but if you need
it you will be making pdf files at the end of day.

> 3. New developer: Becase Luc has implemented both 2 and 3 in lh-tex, I
>    propose that we get Luc into the developer team if he wants. To start
>    with, he can implement his ideas on a seperate branch. Afterwards, we
>    can merge this into the main trunk.

Fine :)

> 4. Citation browser: I know that auctex from emacs has a feature where
>    it sets up a browsable window of the citations found in the bibtex
>    file. We could implement a system where if the user presses <Alt-c>,
>    \cite{} is inserted and the browser comes up asking him to choose a
>    citation.

It could be done also for labels, refpages and so on. I did some time
ago something like this. I have to find it...

> 5. Removal of unwanted cruft: I am pretty sure latex-suite has features
>    which it can afford to lose.

Hmm. I would vote for "other miscellaneous stuff taken from imaps.vim in
main.vim (lines 117-136 in my version). This is really redundant IMO.

My suggestions:

1. Move smartspace.vim and brackets.vim to ftplugin/latex-suite
directory (and add proper lines in main.vim). Now they are in
ftplugin/tex dir and they are automagically sourced. IMO this is a Bad
Thing(tm). We do not have control in which order they are sourced and
more important user doesn't have control.  Because this files have
mappings user should have possibility to overwrite it. With latex-suite
files in ftplugin/tex dir user have to give special names to be sure his
files are sourced at the end.

2. Create vim-latex format with vim-latex menus integrated with normal
Vim menus like this is in HTML editors. For example: disable Syntax
menus, put TeX-Suite/Templates menu into File/New Latex File menu.

Mikolaj