Text Formatting ⇒ LaTeX Productivity Boost?!

[guidotrev]

Hey everyone,

I'm a math major at the University of Chicago, and I spend a lot of time writing math. I primarily use VS Code with the hs-snippets extension, which has been a huge productivity booster. Writing snippets for LaTeX has made my workflow much smoother. For example, instead of typing \frac{}{}, I can simply type "ff" and the snippet will automatically expand, placing the cursor in the first part of the fraction.

However, I've noticed that platforms like Overleaf and other online LaTeX editors don't offer this snippet feature, which is essentially a shortcut for your code.

I'm considering developing a free website that provides this snippet functionality without the need for downloading VS Code and setting up hs-snips. What do you all think of this idea?

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

welcome to the forum!

Good idea! You mentioned Overleaf, which has an auto-completion feature. When you start typing commands, it makes suggestions:

overleaf.png (27.17 KiB) Viewed 16552 times

I simply type \n and get \newcommand{}[]{} suggested (and \newcommand{}{}), with the cursor in the first pair of braces. If it's an environment, it also adds the \end command.

If you develop such a feature yourself, great! It can be used for other online editors too, such as here in the forum, where we use the ace editor for code snippets and online compilable documents.

Stefan

[spramar1]

Have you thought about using vim or emacs? Emacs has yasnippet and vim/neovim has multiple snippet extensions. Both are very customizable. Just offering the suggestion if you haven't considered it yet.

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't see the last part you didn't want to go through the effort of setting up the snippets with vscode. I'll just leave this up just in case.