TabLaTex is a plugin for writing LaTeX documents with the Vim editor. The philosophy behind TabLaTeX is to imitate the tab-completion behaviour of some unix shells (namely the bash shell).
TabLaTeX is a simple plugin for people who don't want to be bothered learning complex key-binding schemes from more complicated (and complete) LaTeX vim plugins. TabLaTeX is supposed to easy to learn and easy to use (i.e.: all the key-bindings "make sense", at least to me).
Most of the TabLaTeX commands are based on tab completion. You will notice that, while writing your text, some keys produce a small delay (for example, pressing 'b'). Don't worry about that, just continue writing as usual.
Now lets say that you would like to put some text in boldface. Instead of writing \textbf{ type b<TAB > (that means to press the b key, release it and then press the TAB key); you should end with the text \textbf{}, and the cursor inside the braces. You have just executed a tab-completion command, congratulations!
Here is the list of the tab-completion commands available in TabLaTeX:
| Command + <TAB> | Description |
|---|---|
| b | Boldface, \textbf{} |
| i | Italic, \textit{} |
| s | Smallcaps, \textsc{} |
| v | Verbatim (one line), \verb++ |
| V | Verbatim, environment, \begin{verbatim} \end{verbatim} |
| t | Typewriter, \texttt{} |
| _ | Underline, \underline{} |
| m | Inline math mode, $ $ |
| I | Itemize, \begin{itemize} \end{itemize} |
| E | Enumerate, \begin{enumerate} \end{enumerate} |
| p | Item, \item{} |
| T | Tabular, \begin{tabular}{} \end{tabular} |
| - | Horizontal line, \hline |
| L | Flushleft, \begin{flushleft} \end{flushleft} |
| R | Flushright, \begin{flushright} \end{flushright} |
| C | Center, \begin{center} \end{center} |
| N | New environment. The name of the environment is asked in the input line of vim |
| * | Insert image, \includegraphics[width=cm]{} |
| } | Move outside a braces delimited section (right) |
| { | Move outside a braces delimited section (left) |
| ] | Move to the end of the current environment |
| [ | Move to the beginning of the current environment |
The commands b,i,s,v,t,_,",L,R,C have a command mode counterpart that can be accessed with Control-C command_key . The command will be applied to the word/line (depending of the command) under the cursor.
So, for example, say you want to put the word under the cursor in boldface. Just switch to command mode (ESC) and press Control-C b
The commands [ and ] move to the beginning and end of an environment, respectively.
TabLaTeX 1.1 has limited support for foldings. When inside of an environment you can fold its contents with e<. You can unfold a folded environment with e>
If you have any comments or suggestions about TabLaTeX send me an email to tablatex (AT) cavecanen (DOT) org
I don't plan to update a lot TabLaTeX, simply because it suits my needs enough. Anyways, all news and updates concerning this plugin will we at http://www.cavecanen.org/latex/tablatex/