Quick tips for technical writing with LaTeX and Neovim

Introduction

I enjoy using Vim when I am writing LaTeX documents for my teaching and research. Since Neovim became available I have been using it as a capable and compelling alternative to Vim. I find that Neovim works really well and that its plugin ecosystem is great! But, if you want the vimtex plugin to work with Neovim, then you need to take two steps, as explained in this post.

What do you need to do to write LaTeX in Neovim? When I was writing Walsh, Kapfhammer, and McMinn (2017)] with Neovim, I needed to change my .vimrc file and install a plugin. After following the instructions to install the neovim-remote plugin, I added this code segment to ensure that vimtex can communicate with the latexmk process that compiles my paper.

if has("nvim")
  let g:vimtex_latexmk_progname = 'nvr'
endif

Retrofit

Wait! There is one more thing. If you, like me, have been using Vim for many years and only recently started to use Neovim, then you will also need to run commands like the following so that you can “retrofit” your Vim configuration to work correctly with Neovim. Or, you can re-write your Vim configuration in Lua, which is what I ended up doing!

ln -s ~/.vim ~/.nvim
ln -s ~/.vimrc ~/.nvim/init.vim

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