Re: [Vim-latex-devel] Alt mappings

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

Srinath Avadhanula wrote:
> Hmm... Lets see... What about moving away from "special" keys altogether
> and using ']l' ']b' ']c' etc in insert mode (as Luc suggests) and
> <M-[lbc]> in normal mode (or maybe even ']b' etc in normal mode as
> well)? This way people who want to use <M-c> etc for national characters
> can continue to do so... Ofcourse this makes the users of latex-suite
> learn yet another "leader" character...  Maybe ']' can be reserved for
> beginning maps which change the text before them in some way... In the
> future, we could have more of such maps...
> 
> Ofcourse, I have still not gotten around to creating a good way to let
> the end user over-ride the maps. Benji suggested that a section of texrc
> can have things like
> 
> " Pressing <F5> will prompt you for which environment to insert.
> " Change <F5> to change the ``hotkey''.
> nmap <silent> <F5> <Plug>Tex_FastEnvironmentInsert
> 
> etc. The user needs to change the lhs in these lines to customize...
> But texrc or the user's copy of texrc is sourced only once when
> latex-suite initializes, not for every BufEnter event... So that might
> not be a good place...

      Actually, I was suggesting something more radical.  Something like 
this:

" We do not need much of a comment because we use long, descriptive
" variable names.
" Key for inserting a TeX environment (duh).
" See :help latex-environment for details.
" Usually, these :help pointers in the comments will apply to several
" options at once.
let Tex_FastEnvironmentInsert = ''	" '<F5>' is popular.
" Either default to empty string as above or else comment it out:
" let Tex_FastEnvironmentInsert = '<F5>'

Then the TexSetOptions() function (called on each FileType tex event, I 
think) can test whether g:Tex_FastEnvironmentInsert exists (or is not 
the empty string) and use it to define a map if so.  This is the way I 
did it way back in texmacros.vim (for vim 5.3+).

> Should we just document all the maps created by latex-suite in
> latex-suite.txt and then put "Read the docs about how to override
> mappings" somewhere in the install instructions?

      Yes.  Each group of related options in texrc should have a comment 
pointing to the appropriate tag in doc/latex-suite.txt .

> Luc, Mikolaj, Fabio any suggestions? The rest of us AFAIK do not use
> the meta key anyway...
> 
> I just thought about this? Are things like ']b' etc going to cause the
> same kind of problems diacritics caused? Do strings like ']b' occur
> often in latex?

      Closed intervals are pretty common:  $[a,b]$.  Some authors like 
to reverse the brackets for open intervals:  $]a,b[$  instead of 
$(a,b)$.  (I have to restrain myself:  let's not disparage anyone's 
nationality!)  Of course, we could make ']b' do something special in 
text mode, but not in math mode.

Vim modes:	Insert (and Replace)
		Normal (a.k.a. Beep or Escape mode)
		Command (a.k.a. : or Ex mode)
		Visual (and Select)

TeX modes:	Horizontal (a.k.a text or paragraph mode)
			(and Restricted Horizontal, a.k.a. LR, mode)
		Vertical (and Internal Vertical)
		Math
		Display Math

Why do I mention this?  Mostly because it is late, but also because I 
was a little worried that mentioning a TeX mode might lead to confusion 
because Vim had modes, too.

					--Benji