Experience joy-filled technical writing with LaTeX, Vim, and Git
Introduction
If you are like me, then you may enjoy writing in a notebook with a fountain pen — if you have not tried writing this way, then borrow someone’s fountain pen and try it. As much as I may like taking notes and brainstorming with a fountain pen, I spend a substantial amount of time preparing technical papers and presentations in LaTeX with the Vim text editor — a task I also find to be challenging and rewarding. Thankfully, some tools can aid your writing process!
Tools
If you write with Vim and LaTeX and you would like to improve your writing experience, then please consider using the vimtex plugin as it supports wonderful features like the completion of BibTeX references, continuous compilation with latexmk, and forward and reverse searching for either the Zathura or MuPDF PDF viewers. Are you interested in learning more about how I configured these plugins? Please study the source code of my .vimrc that is available in the GitHub repository called gkapfham/dotfiles.
Examples
Yes, it is possible to use these tools to create nicely formatted and correct papers. As an example of a paper, please consider reading (McMinn, Kapfhammer, and Wright 2016)
Since this blog post was written, I continue to use LaTeX to prepare research articles. However, I now use Neovim instead of Vim! With that said, you can still check out the configuration files in gkapfham/dotfiles to learn more about my current setup. Finally, instead of using LaTeX to create presentations, I now normally use Neovim to create Markdown, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.