Project 04

Project-04 neovim config

I have been using neovim for a while now, and yes, the initial upfront time investment in learning vim is definitely worthwhile. I have kept my neovim config in this repository, and it is not very original, since it is basically put together from chunks and snippets of code here and there on the internet, and adding a little bit of tweak to suit some personal idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless, it has everything I need for now. I use parker.nvim to manage my plugins, but I might switch to lazy.nvim in the near future. While writing this post, I could hit Alt + k to open markdownpreview in an existing browser session, which is equivalent to type the command :MarkdownPreview. And this is achieved by installing the following plugin via packer

-- install without yarn or npm
use({
    "iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim",
    run = function() vim.fn["mkdp#util#install"]() end,
})

use({ "iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim", run = "cd app && npm install", setup = function() vim.g.mkdp_filetypes = { "markdown" } end, ft = { "markdown" }, })

And other plugins are installed similarly. There are full-blown IDEs right in your terminals like LunarVim, but right now, I just want to focus on a few things.

nvim and LaTex

I think the major benefit of writing mathematics using nvim locally versus using Overleaf is you get to use snippets. And there is an excellent guide here. Before I tell you how I use snippets in typesetting math, let us first figure out how to install Tex locally on your machine. For me, I am on a ubuntu machine right now, so I open a browser and go to https://www.tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html and follow their tl;dr direction:

1. cd into a directory where you want to keep the binary files,
2. download using this command wget https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
3. alternatively, using curl to download: curl -L -o install-tl-unx.tar.gz https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
4. then simply enter the following command in the terminal and wait for the process to complete:

zcat < install-tl-unx.tar.gz | tar xf -
cd install-tl-*
sudo perl ./install-tl --no-interaction

one common error

One common error is one might not have perl or curl or (some other necessary packages) installed on one’s linux machine, so we can check via the following command:

curl --version
perl --version

and if you do not see the version number and some general info in the standard output, then you might not have it installed on your machine. To install, (take ubuntu for example) we can do the following;

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade 

this step is to update your system’s package repository, so you could get the latest versions. Then we run the following;

sudo apt install perl
sudo apt install curl

and after the installation finishes, we should be good to go.

another common error

Another common error is to forget to add texlive to your PATH. After installing Tex, usually in the terminal standard output, there’s direction to add a string like the following to PATH:

/usr/local/texlive/2023/bin/x86_64-linux

I have the following lines in my ~/.bashrc to achieve precisely this:

# add to PATH texlive
export  PATH="/usr/local/texlive/2023/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH"

and if you have just added this line to your .bashrc, don’t forget to source it for it to take effect in the existing terminal, otherwise, you need to open a new terminal for it to take effect. One quick way to check if it is already in your PATH:

echo "$PATH"

then you could just eyeball the output and see if the desired string is already there.

Migrating from Packer to Lazy.nvim

Right now, I’m in the process of migrating from Packer to Lazy, and the following migration guide from Lazy documentation is quite useful. I have modified packer.lua accordingly and renamed it lazy.lua, and it more or less worked for me, except I could not get the LaTex Snippets and .tex document syntax highlighting to work. I am still working on it, and hopefully I will find a solution!