I’ve been in geek-love with two things recently: Vim and Markdown. I do all my note-taking and list-making with Markdown. And I’m totally head-over-heels for the vim-instant-markdown plugin. Unfortunately, it just about spoiled me rotten when I had to whip together some LaTeX for the first time.
Sick of running pdflatex after any change, I cobbled together my first little Vim script to do the deed for me. TeX files are compiled on write, and the resulting PDF pops up in your default PDF viewer. Additionally, any writes to a .cls result in a search for TeX files referencing the class. Those files are PDF’d and opened as well. It weighed in at only 32 lines but it did the trick, speeding up my annoying compile and check cycle nicely.
You can check out the source on Github.
Only after completing my little hobby project, I realized a similar plugin might already exist. That alternative seems to be vim-latex-live-preview. It’s pretty nifty, but appears to require the use of evince or okular as pdf viewers, and also doesn’t support multi-document files. So editing a .cls just gives me a Failed to compile.
Which makes my Vim project time well spent.
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