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

[Benji F. <be...@me...>]

Srinath Avadhanula wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Its been quite a hectic coding time in the vim-latex project and its
> time to step back and take note of all the things which we did/will do.

      This is a useful review.  I am sorry I could not reply sooner.

> 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.

      Yes, this is annoying.  Features should follow the principle of 
least surprise.  They should be off by default if they cause problems 
for anyone:  it is better to require the user to do some work (edit 
texrc, for example) to turn on a useful feature than to force the user 
to twiddle things to get it to work.

      Sooner or later, I plan to have a comprehensive look at texrc: 
put the definition of :TexLet elsewhere, move the documentation into 
doc/latex-suite.txt, review the defaults.  For now, turning off 
diacritics by default is a great first step.

:help design-flexible

> 2. This is as of now, poor documentation at various places. Often times,
>    the script file contains documentation, whereas it should be in a
>    doc/.txt file (in the case of imaps.vim). Sometimes, documentation is
>    just plain missing (in the case of bibtex.vim). I suspect that there
>    are quite a few features of latex-suite even I dont know about.
>    Especially in the case of bibtex.vim, the lack of documentation and
>    menu items etc leads it to be completeley lost to the end-user.
>    Latex-suite really needs some time spent on documentation.

      I give this a very high priority.

:help design-documented

> 3. There are still 'funky' characters in various places of latex-suite
>    leading to internationalization issues.
> 
> 4. Some of the maps do not check for hasmapto(rhs) and mapcheck(lhs)
>    before mapping. This needs to change.
> 
> Future Directions
> =================

      Yup, there is plenty left to do.  ;)

					--Benji