Dear Haris, Allan, Max and all the LaTeX-ed Maters out there…
now that I have finished almost my whole thesis (I am a chemist) with TextMate and the LaTeX bundle, as well as having another larger LaTeX project ahead of me, I would like to offer some feedback as well. I am not sure I would have enjoyed writing thousand of lines of text in LaTeX without the usefulness of TM or the bundle… so first of all many thanks to Allan and everyone involved!
Am 10. Sep 2006 um 05:12 schrieb Charilaos Skiadas:
On Sep 9, 2006, at 6:40 PM, Max Lein wrote:
(i) No known command list: suggestion: type command: text stays grayish-blue until a command is recognized. Then the text turns dark blue. Basically there should be user feedback whenever a command is recognized.
I can provide you with a list of `official' LaTeX commands if needed.
a very good idea, but I would like to have two such lists. One for the official commands, and another one for bundle commands (possibly including the most used ones) that is also user configurable, maybe via a TM_LATEX_BLABLA variable? As an example: I have used glosstex and there are quite a bit of possibly commands coming with it (as mentioned previously on the list where I posted a snippet of my personal flavor of the latex.grammar). Also I would love to have my custom commands as defined in my preamble color-coded, but thos would either have to be parsed by a script or added manually to the "second" list.
(iii) Footnotes and marginpars should be marked within the text; perhaps the footnote's/marginpar's text could even be folded (not sure if automatic foldmark recognition works on a bundle level).
allan: (iii) marking: yes, folding: we can’t do w/o having the braces align
me: The text in the footnote gets a scope of meta.footnote.latex So if you add that scope to your coloring theme and add some color to it, you'll get highlighted footnotes. Not immediately possible for marginpars, but we are thinking of matching those as well and giving them some scope extending both footnotes and marginpars, so that you could color both of them at the same time.
Update: marginpars are now matched with scope meta.paragraph.marginpar.latex, so you can color them as you like.
Folding: I have toyed with changing my snippets for the headings to include a commented line corresponding to the heading and then have TM fold over the two, such as:
\section{section name}\label{sec:sectionname}
%endsection
This works when the grammar contains the correct folding start- and stop- markers.
Footnote coloring was one of the first things I added to my tmTheme ;) If we added a snippet "fn" that created a footnote beginning on a new line and provided some help for folding I believe this would do as well, not?
(iv) Use input instead of include when dragging a .tex document into another: afaik include is deprecated and input is preferred instead. You cannot `include' some bundles for instance (diagxy comes to mind), you have to use input instead.
(…)
Of course, you can easily change this in your own copy, by opening the bundle editor and finding the appropriate drag command. All you have to do is change the \\include that appears there to \\input.
Or set a TM_VARIABLE? I am always a bit careful about changing the predefined bundles - you do lose any upcoming updates, although one could expect no major changes at a certain level of maturity of the bundle. But debugging things will become quite difficult… or have I missed an important change in the way things are handled?
(vi) Inline formulas should have a grayish background so it's easier to see where formulas begin and where they end. (This one is also important to me.)
allan: (vi) that’d be a theme-thing, as long as the grammar marks them up
me: Do you want the background for inline formulas to be different than the one for multiline formulas? Because as things are already, you can target the scope math.tex in your theme, and that would color all math however you tell it to.
If you add a transparent background you can also markup lists and have nested lists shown in distinct colors!
(vii) You already have tab triggers for section, subsection and subsubsection, so how come chapter is missing?
allan: (vii) oversight (and we rarely need it)
is it missing? I have one sitting here in my "sec" snippet, but then I do have many changes in the bundle itself and not all of the migrated out to my personal flavor… ;)
(viii) A way to execute bibtex (and pdflatex twice to see whether all additional citations have been included).
allan: (viii) latexmk.pl should do that — maybe we should make this the default, not sure if that would bother anyone (maybe some workflows would mean much more time typesetting)
me: latexmk.pl will actually do a lot more for you. The Help file should describe how to set it up. I'd personally prefer not to have it as the default. It is however easy to set it in your system.
Is it normal that latexmk.pl does 6 runs of pdflatex? I have found this to be too slow for most things and added my own "render"- commands; but I also had to include glosstex in the mix… Is there some easy way to configure this? But maybe one can expect that most latex-users would be able to hack their own changes into the bundle, but a certain level of comfortable configuration might be useful as well - best achieved by setting TM_VARIABLE, not?
So much for now… there are some more things that I cannot get my head straight at yet, but I will post updates in the future -- better observed while actually working on it.
Have a nice sunday, Dan