Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

http://piotrkazmierczak.com/2010/05/13/emacs-as-the-ultimate-latex-editor/

by pmoriarty • 12 years ago

102 40 12 years ago

mih3• 12 years ago

Anyone seriously considering Emacs for LaTeX editing should also take a look at the yasnippet package. The customizable autocompletion shortcuts make it really easy to insert commands using just keywords. In my case this has proved to be very helpful especially when inserting figures or inline equations. I can create a snippet so that when I type fig+<tab> it inserts a \begin{figure}.. \end{figure}float and positions the cursor at the proper field saving me a lot of keystrokes.

josteink• 12 years ago

I've stopped using yasnippet because I find it too resource-intensive. It's especially noticeable on emacs-startup, even of good machines, and I've found myself not using it very often. So I decided that it wasn't worth the time.

Just as a FYI to people on weaker hardware.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

I never really investigated why, I think it's because I use melpa as my main package repository, but yasnippet loads lazily now. This is assuming the 'old' package didn't have this set up by default.

pmoriarty7• 12 years ago

My main gripe with yasnippet is that its feature list is pretty lackluster compared to some advanced vim snippet plugins like xptemplate.[1]

xptemplate has a bazillion features, and yasnippet is primitive in comparison. Just a simple example is that in xptemplate (and probably any respectable snippet plugin in vim) you can type a part of a snippet name, hit TAB, and it will expand the snippet whose partial name you typed (assuming there's no exact match). In yasnippet, you have to type out the full snippet name before it can be expanded. This is pretty annoying, especially for long snippet names.

There are tons of other examples of far more advanced functionality, such as a variety of snippet repetition and embedding features.

This comparative lack of features in yasnippet is pretty surprising, because emacs extensions are usually very feature rich, and everyone seems to love yasnippet. But I think that's because most emacs users don't know what they're missing.

And before someone says it, yes, I know yasnippet gives you the ability to embed eLisp code in it, so I could potentially write all the functionality I need myself. But that's really beside the point. I'm talking about built-in features, not the ability to code up the features myself.

[1] https://github.com/drmingdrmer/xptemplate

pXMzR2A• 12 years ago

C-c C-e fig TAB RET

C-c C-e means "give me a new environment"

mih3• 12 years ago

Sure Auctex does provides kb-shortcuts. But rather than using predefined keystrokes, I prefer to use my own. Besides, snippets can be used for commands/environments for which AucTex provides no shortcut or for things such as macros.

tincholio• 12 years ago

AUCTeX has the LaTeX-environment function (C-c C-e by default) that does even better than that (inserts the figure environment, offers to center, creates a label, a caption, etc.), and also handles all environments, plus there's no need to create the snippets.

mih3• 12 years ago

I just used figure as an example. If there's no predefined keystroke or function available such as in the case of LaTeX macros that you tend to use frequently, snippets can be of use. Of course one can do without them, but they're definitely worth considering if you use emacs regularly.

alceta• 12 years ago

I'm tired of these superlatives like 'THE best editor', it adds nothing to the quality of a blog entry.

vsbuffalo• 12 years ago

I hate the best editor debate because I think it's distracting from what's more important — what both editors can learn from each other and what both need to do to improve. I used Emacs for years, switched to Vim because of RSI, then recently switched back to emacs+evil. Frankly, for what I do most (R, R+knitr, C++ with clang autocomplete), no single editor is great. First, there's too little ability to switch between modes within a single buffer in both Vim and Emacs. The feature's entirely lacking in Vim AFAIK, and poly-mode in R uses a high level hack that (1) doesn't play well with other modes (including evil) and (2) has so thoroughly destroyed my documents in the past I refuse to use it now (mostly because it uses many buffers behind the scenes, which destroys undo history).

In general, if you want flawless R support in certain blocks of text (as in a .Rnw file) in between LaTeX blocks that are fully connected to AucTeX, well... you're out of luck. And Vim... Vim-R-Plugin is useful, but it's sort of a painful hack to use tmux just to get R and Vim to talk (and I'm saying this even though I love Tmux).

Vim has YouCompleteMe, which is smooth as silk compared to Emac's options (which are painful and poorly integrated, especially with clang). But some lower-level issue in Vim causes this constant error message in Vim whenever YouCompleteMe uses clang — bloody annoying. So overall, both editors have huge issues that would require serious overhauls or tedious bug fixing in various modes. Sure, Emacs does AucTeX better, but until it does everything better (or Vim does everything better) it's a flawed editor. Both are flawed editors. But sadly everyone thinks the best course of action is to start fresh — which usually creates a feature-poor flawed editor on a new shiny foundation, that fails to attract developers because it's feature poor. (apologies for ranting -- jetlag).

RBerenguel• 12 years ago

Code (live code) + LaTeX can be done with org-babel (kind of,) and I use mmm-mode (sorry, not on my computer now and don't remember the precise name, but it's on Melpa) and for multiple major modes in different blocks, works nicely (but don't know a way to keep the defined modes per section across sessions/file closes)

melling• 12 years ago

Well, the "best editor debates" do keep people from being insular. :-)

Are the vi keybindings really better for your RSI? I've heard different stories. For example,

http://changelog.complete.org/archives/661-so-long-vim-im-re...

There's a new ergoemacs mode that I haven't tried yet: http://ergoemacs.org

Personally, I spend more time using IntelliJ, Xcode, and Sublime these days, but recently I started using Emacs again for a bunch of .org stuff.

By the way, there's an Emacs StackExchange which will hopefully make emacs more accessible.

http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/2671/how-can-i-get-...

chongli2• 12 years ago

Neovim has a good chance to become the best editor. They are taking a really hard stance against all the cruft in Vim and have some really great features already implemented. I'm especially excited about their goal of reimplementing all IO with libuv. The lack of proper asynchronous IO has been a sore point in vim and emacs for a long, long time.

catern• 12 years ago

Uh, Emacs has asynchronous IO, and it works fine. http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Asy...

tuhdo4• 12 years ago

What's wrong with Company: http://company-mode.github.io/? It can give me a large amount of completion candidates without any issue. It's also smooth. Maybe you are using auto-complete?

grayclhn• 12 years ago

AUCTeX mode is great; less well known is CDLaTeX mode, which has a lot of quick abbreviations for mathematical symbols, etc. I'm a huge fan: https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/c.dominik/Tools/cdlatex/cdlatex.el

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

I switched to vim years ago for everything else, but I still use emacs specifically for auctex. I have yet to find a vim equivalent nearly as convenient. In particular, C-c C-c as a do what I mean compiler (checking timestamps to figure out whether to run LaTeX, BibTeX, etc, as well as C-c C-e to insert an environment, and alt-enter to insert a newline and \item.

martinbm• 12 years ago

Have you tried looking at VIM-LaTeX (http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net)? It does exactly what you described and is just as customisable as auctex.

For example: <leader>ll will compile your document, multiple times if necessary, and show you warnings/errors in a new window, letting you hit enter on each to jump to the line. Lots of helpers for inserting environments, items, packages, too!

But if you're used Emacs just for auctex, more power to you for harnessing the power of two awesome editors!

pmoriarty7• 12 years ago

I just use snippets (via xptemplate) to do LaTeX editing in vim. For running LaTeX, BibTeX, pdftex, etc, I use LatexMk.[1]

I would be interested to hear what AucTEX provides that the above combination can't.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LatexMk

yummyfajitas• 12 years ago

Navigation and label handling. M-j lets you jump to a section, C-( inserts a uniquely numbered \lab and C-) gives a menu for inserting a \ref to an existing label.

(These may not be standard bindings - my .emacs is a horrible mess of legacy code dating back to a pre-git world.)

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

I don't find snippets nearly as convenient as the built-in auctex keybindings. C-c C-e itemize <enter> item1 <alt-enter> item2 gives me (properly indented for surrounding context):

    \begin{itemize}
    \item item1
    \item item2
    \end{itemize}

I could probably convince vim to do that, but auctex does it out of the box with no additional configuration required.

Likewise, I could probably set makeprg to latexmk or rubber or some other DWIM script, but that ought to Just Work as easily as auctex's C-c C-c, and shouldn't require a pile of configuration.

I haven't even found a way to bind <A-Enter> in vim's insert mode, because vim can't distinguish that from <Esc><Enter>.

kyrre• 12 years ago

I feel like the secret to being productive with LaTeX is not the editor, but the build script (latexmk).

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

More details?

kgabis2• 12 years ago

The best latex editor I used so far is TexPad (https://www.texpadapp.com), but it's only available on OSX and iOS...

pmoriarty7• 12 years ago

Could you elaborate on that? What makes it the best for you? More to the point, in what ways is it better than AucTEX?

kgabis2• 12 years ago

* It's a standalone and native OS X application

* It has code completion

* File and document navigation is easy thanks to tree view

* It works out of the box, no dependencies other than TeX required

scorpion032• 12 years ago

The best LaTeX editor I have found is [Latexian](http://tacosw.com/latexian/)

In a discussion on Latex Editors, I find it surprising how it was not mentioned even, so far.

pmoriarty7• 12 years ago

Could you elaborate on that? What makes it the best for you? More to the point, in what ways is it better than AucTEX?

diarg• 12 years ago

Indeed, Emacs rocks for LaTeX.

It would rock harder is someone(tm) implemented a visual version of LaTeX, for small quick documents and for newbie accessibility.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

There's Lyx, though I've long found it harder to deal with than straight-up LaTeX.

If you're doing quick small documents, Markdown and Pandoc may well be a better fix for you.

A useful mode for working with LaTeX (or other tagged documents) is to have a build system which watches your source, re-builds it as you edit it, and a viewer which updates as the generated PDF is refreshed.

You can do this with LaTeX, Markdown + Pandoc, or numerous other systems. It's quite powerful.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

I'm seeing a lot of "X is best" or "y additional feature is powerful".

Neither adds much to the discussion.

Which isn't to say that posts such as this can't provide value. I've been using vim and its antecedents for over a quarter century, as well as well over another editors and authoring tools (closer to two dozen). Including a few forays into emacs-land.

I find discussions of tools useful, and have added a few to my own suite in the past year. Most recently vim-outliner, an outlining plug-in for vim, also Pandoc, and in the past two years, for the first time after considering it for a long time, LaTeX.

Describing WHY an editor or tool suits you, or SPECIFIC features it has or offers, is far more useful.

It will also make the discussion here hugely more valuable than just pointing people at vim or emacs (again). Both are pretty easy to find without that help.

Providing reasons and specific benefits -- much more valuable.

hchenji• 12 years ago

Try out TexStudio (http://texstudio.sourceforge.net/). Free, open source, integrates with MikTex, ctrl-space autocompletion for bibtex entries, can easily switch build chain from latex-dvi-ps-pdf to xelatex-pdf or pdflatex or latex-dvipdf.

Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

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