[TxMt] Fwd: Latex Bundle Useability (and patch)

[Peter Gerdes]

So I'm working on writing up my (mathematical logic) thesis and I've  
been using textmate to do it.  Unfortunately I've ran into some  
serious usability issues with the latex bundle in textmate and  
unsurprisingly have been wasting time trying to fix them.  I figured  
I would post the issues to this list along with some of the hacks  
that seem to help for me and see if people who know more about the  
textmate stuff can help make this bundle more useable for intense  
mathematics.

First of all I'm attaching a simple patch for PyTeXdoc.py so it  
queries kpsewhich to look for included/inputed files if it fails to  
find them.  Since I keep some general purpose includes in my tex  
directory this makes a difference.
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   Note that this is patched from the tree updated earlier today.

Now for some harder issues that I can only gesture at solving.

Useability Issues:

1) Typing commands inside $$ causes wacky highlighting flip-flops.

Often I will be editing an existing tex file and need to add  
something like $\Gamma_{\alpha+1}(\sigma)\concat\tau$.  This causes  
issues since you have to pass through $$ $\$, $\Gamma_{\}$  and  $ 
\Gamma_{\alpha+1}(\sigma)\concat\$ on the way each of which flips the  
syntax highlighting for the ENTIRE rest of the document.  Not only is  
this annoying it causes unacceptable slowdowns as the rest of the doc  
is rehighlighted.

My personal collection of hacks to deal with this problem is as  
follows (some of these are old so i apologize if it was fixed in the  
bundle and I missed it):
	
a) Elimate the $$   $$ notation for display math.  It is considered  
bad form to use the old $$ $$ approach rather than the new \[ \]  
notation.  I realize doing something like this would be controversial  
in the default language grammar but I'd rather have the right way of  
doing things be useable rather than correctly hightlighting the wrong  
way.  But maybe there is another way to deal with the issue.

b) Require $ to be escaped as {\$}.  Once again not a good general  
solution but for me this works since I rarely use a real dolsign.   
Perhaps a better trick would be to require this weird special  
escaping only when in math mode.  Once again I'm puzzled about how to  
do this correctly but as it stands it causes serious problems.

c) I used to have problems with $\Gamma_{\}$ letting the braces spill  
over but it is either fixed now I or I changed something locally I  
don't remember.

2) Typing { when the caret is before a slash causes smart typing  
pairs to insert {\} instead of {} because it thinks we are trying to  
escape the {.  This can be fixed by changing the match for  
constant.character.escape.tex to start with a positive backref of (?<= 
\\) instead of just (\\).  It seems weird to me that having a caret  
in front of the string causes it to be grabbed but go figure.

3) Often I need to insert math inside an already written paragraph.   
So I start with a line like
	If $x$ is a blah then blah2
and need to fix it to
	If $x$ is a blah and $math stuff$ then blah2
which one naturally does by simply putting the caret in front of the  
t in then and starting to type.  Unfortunately the smart typing pairs  
for $ fail to activate when you are in front of a character.  I have  
no idea why this is (seems to work for {) but the best fix I could  
come up with was a hack to define meta.in-front-of-char.latex and  
create a snippet for this situation assigning it to $.  If I knew how  
to insert true smart typing pairs from a snippet (or command) a  
general purpose solution that works could be found.

On the other hand probably anyone who knows textmate well enough will  
see how to do this in an elegant fashion.

4) SPEED

This is a big one.  Frequently I will type a long paragraph filled  
with many many math commands and my powerbook G4 1Ghz will slow  
enough to make typing difficult if I am inserting anything inside the  
paragraph.  If I actually hard wrap the lines this stops happening  
but since textmate doesn't support hard wrapping well this isn't  
really an option.

I noticed in the language definition there are many syntax elements  
(like meta.function.embedded.java.latex) whose matches begin with  
something like:  (?:\s*)((\\)begin) .....  I can't figure out what  
sense this makes at all.  Why match the spaces if they can just  
happen anywhere in the line?  Maybe I am just missing something  
obvious and I'm deluding myself but when I changed these all to (?:^ 
\s*)((\\)begin) .... everything seemed to keep working and things  
seemed to speed up considerably.  Then again maybe it was an  
unrelated bundle update.

Still before I keep screwing with this I figured I would toss this  
out there and see if it was a well known problem.

------------------

Sorry to describe the changes I made rather than giving a bunch of  
patches but the normal bundle development model just won't work for  
me.  I change a bunch of stuff for my personal use (like some of the  
hacks above) so I need to keep the ~/Library/Application Support/ 
Textmate directory for my own personal modifications.  If someone  
could tell me an easy way to produce a diff of the changes I've made  
here with the actual bundle maybe I could be more helpful.

Anyway thanks to the author(s) of the latex bundle for all the work  
they've put in so far.  Hopefully this was helpful an not just  
useless bitching.

Peter