Re: [NTG-context] FYI

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

On 2/25/07, Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

...

Info for the gang:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=223940&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=18135068#18135322

(last paragraph)

This does not affect me or many of us but it's good to know the vibes out there.

All the vim latex suite is really doing is packaging a bunch of (not very good) plugins. It wouldn't require much work to do something similar for context. But I'm not the guy for that, sorry.

I have written some plugins for context that I use. Basically, a compiler plugin, a syntax highlight (I could not get spell checking to work with Nikolai's syntax hightlight file, and I want slightly differnt syntax highlighting), an indent file, copied part of vim-latex that translates `a to \alpha (in utf), a text reformatter that recognizes context delimiters (vim's inbuild paragraph makers only understand troff markup), mappings to compile, check, and view pdf files from F-key mappings, and a menu to for couple of less used options (context update, regenerate formats, etc.). I also have a regex mess that aligns key=value kind of arguments. I never completely liked latex-suite's environment expanders, i.e., EEQ expands to \begin{equation} .. \end{equation}. Recently, I discovered snippetEmu, that allows textmate like snippets in vim, and I have been experimenting using it for few commonly using snippets. There are a few quirks, but so far I like it. Most of this is pretty simple. There is no support for multi-file compilations (like latex-suite), no replace environment, the errorformat handler does not always work, the indent file is not fail proof (gg=G will not give good results). And nothing is customizable. Things are how I like them. I haven't been able to figure out how to port texshow to vim, and how to get omni-completion to work. There is no tags support either. If others are interested, I could release it as a poor man's context-suite for vim, until someone does the whole thing in a proper manner. However, I am not convinced on how useful such a package will be. If you keep things uncustomizable, not many people will like it. If you keep them customizable, it usually becomes a mess. Cream is the only plugin for vim that I know which is customizable and easy to use. Others, latex-suite, taglist, project manager, are just too complicated to use. Aditya