vimtex

Introduction

There exists several LaTeX plugins for vim, for instance:

• LaTeX-Suite: vimscript#475
• AutomaticTexPlugin: vimscript#2945
• LaTeX-Box: vimscript#3109
• vim-latex-live-preview: vimscript#4524

I have been using both LaTeX-Suite and LaTeX-Box myself, but I found both of these to be relatively bulky and difficult to manage and extend. LaTeX-Box was supposed to be simple and lightweight, and I think it was close to being just that. However, after having worked on it for some time, I felt that much of the simplicity could be improved by a complete restructuring.

Enter vimtex, which is a lightweight and simple plugin that provides LaTeX support for vim. It has most of the functionality of LaTeX-Box, but the idea is to combine vimtex with the strength of other plugins. I personally recommend UltiSnips for snippets and neocomplete for completion.

Read the documentation for a more thorough introduction.

Installation

With gmarik vundle

https://github.com/gmarik/vundle

Add Plugin 'lervag/vimtex' to your ~/.vimrc and run :PluginInstall in a vim buffer. Add ! to the command to update.

With neobundle

https://github.com/Shougo/neobundle.vim

Add NeoBundle 'lervag/vimtex' to your ~/.vimrc and run :NeoBundleInstall in a vim buffer. Add ! to the command to update.

With pathogen

https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen

Add the vimtex bundle to your bundle directory, for instance with git clone. This will typically be enough:

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone git://github.com/lervag/vimtex

Without a plugin manager

Copy the directories to your .vim/ folder.