In this post I have written down the steps one can follow to use the Terminal Emulator as a versatile LaTeX editor. A good reference for learning LaTeX is “The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX.”

Preparation

The plan is to use Vim as the text-editor and MuPDF as the pdf-viewer since both can be accessed solely via keyboard, while keeping all the desired features from other LaTex editor like “live pdf preview” and “compile using latexmk” from GTK based Gummi and “forward and backward search to switch between the sources and the PDF” and “detailed compilation errors” from Qt based TexMaker.

We will need the following packages to begin with:

If you want GUI version of Vim then can get gVim by installing the package vim-X11. For gVim you will have to modify these steps accordingly.

Vim configuration

Once you finish learning basics using vimtutor, you are ready to start configuring Vim as per your requirements.

.vimrc file creation

To start Vim with all the favorite option settings and mappings, one writes them in what is called the vimrc file. The vimrc file can contain all the commands that you type after a colon. Vim executes the commands in this file when it starts up. Read the documentation for more details. Note that Vim 8.0 onwards, if Vim is started normally and no user vimrc file is found, the defaults.vim script is loaded. This will set ‘compatible’ off, switch on syntax highlighting and a few more things. See this reddit post for a discussion about this. To disable loading of defaults.vim completely add let skip_defaults_vim=1 to /etc/vimrc (see this).

Since vimrc is something personal that evolves over times as per one’s usage requirements, it’s not recommended to blindly copy it from the internet. I used this example as reference for creating the following ~/.vimrc

set nocompatible               " get rid of Vi compatibility mode. 
filetype plugin indent on      " filetype detection[ON] plugin[ON] auto-indent[ON] depending on filetype
set t_Co=256                   " enable 256-color mode.
syntax enable                  " enable syntax highlighting (can also use syntax on).
colorscheme morning            " I am using it with solarized (dark) color pallet in xfce4-terminal.
set hidden                     " allows you to re-use the same window without saving it first and keep an undo history for all the files using the same window.
set number                     " show line numbers to the left
set ruler                      " Always show cursor position.
set laststatus=2               " always display the status line so that you can see the current mode, file name, file status, ruler, etc. 
filetype indent on             " activates indenting for files
set hlsearch                   " highlight searched phrases.
set ignorecase                 " Make searches case-insensitive.
set smartcase                  " Make search case-sesitive when using capital letters
set autoindent                 " When opening a new line and no filetype-specific indenting is enabled, keep " the same indent as the line you're currently on.
set backspace=indent,eol,start " Allow backspacing over autoindent, line breaks and start of insert action
set tabstop=8                  " sets tab stops to 8 characters wide
set softtabstop=4              " makes the Tab key intent by 4 spaces
set shiftwidth=4               " width of autointents set to 4 spaces
set expandtab                  " converts tabs to white space
set mouse=a                    " Enable use of the mouse for all modes
set wrap linebreak nolist      " Soft wrapping text. To move the cursor up and down within wrapped line use the commands gk and gj.

You can use this guide to create a backup of your vimrc file using GitHub so that you can easily configure Vim on any other computer (how to find git folder). You can follow the official guide to set-up GitHub for this purpose.

vimtex plugin installation and configuration

You can install vimtex manually or using a plugin manager (see this guide). We will use the vim-plug plugin manager to install vimtex. Firstly, we will download plug.vim and put it in the ~/.vim/autoload directory using following code:

curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

Next we will enable vimtex by adding the following section to the ~/.vimrc file:

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')  " Specify the directory ~/.vim/plugged for plugins. Avoid using standard Vim directory names like ~/.vim/plugin
Plug 'lervag/vimtex'               " Shorthand notation for fetching the vimtex plugin from https://github.com/lervag/vimtex
call plug#end()                    " To update &runtimepath and initialize plugin system

Once the vimrc is properly configured, restart Vim or reload the vimrc file (make sure that git is installed for this to work). Finally, run the :PlugInstall command to start the installation of vimtex plugin. Vim-plug will download all the packages directly from GitHub and put them into the ~/.vim/plugged directory and load them whenever Vim is loaded. To update plugins use :PlugUpdate command and to remove them use :PlugClean command. Also, to update vim-plug itself, use :PlugUpgrade command.

Now we will set it up following the official documentation of vimtex, and adding the following to ~/.vimrc:

let g:tex_flavor = 'latex'           " Vim ships with some support for plain TeX, ConTeXt, and LaTeX files. This means that the `.tex` extension is ambiguous. Vimtex is only activated for LaTeX files with 'filetype' set to `tex`.
let g:vimtex_view_method = 'mupdf'   "  Set the pdf viewer. MuPDF supports forward and backward search via xdotool. For backward search use :VimtexRSearch command. Forward search will only take you to the correct page.  Backward search will take you to the line in Vim that corresponds to the first line of the current page in MuPDF.
let g:vimtex_compiler_latexmk= {'options' : ['-pdf', '-shell-escape', '-verbose', '-file-line-error', '-synctex=1', '-interaction=nonstopmode',],} " we need to enable -shell-escape to be able to use externalization library for avioiding recompiling unchanged diagrams/graphs created using tikz/pgfplots

Note that by default the following desired options are already there:

• latexmk is the compiler which does compilation as soon as you save the file (continous compilation, better than live preview)
• auto-completion is enabled,
• BibTex is used for bib files,
• fold types are enabled,
• intentation in both tex and bib are enabled,
• vimtex will open the pdf viewer automatically after compilation
• forward search is enabled, i.e. it will perform a forward search to the current cursor position when the first invocation of the pdf viewer happens. It uses SyncTex and requires xdotool to work with MuPDF (also prevents opening multiple instances of pdf).

You can further customize by adding snippets as demonstrated in various blog posts (ex1, ex2, ex3 and ex4).

Usage instructions

Following are the useful key mappings for the various vimtex commands:

We have many other shorthand keymaps like:

Note that vimtex supports most multi-file documents. The main method uses a recursive search algorithm that should find the main LaTeX file in most cases. Read the documentation for more details.