FasTeX_Snippets

Snippet version of FasTeX shortcuts for LaTeX, for VSCode and Atom.

This is a port of the FasTeX system of shortcuts to editors that use snippets, currently targeting VSCode and Atom. It is based on the WinEdt version by Bernhard Enders.

• FasTeX project
• Original documentation
• WinEdt version

The basic idea is that you type shortcut codes that are replaced with LaTeX. The shortcuts are made up of lower-case letter and (occasionally) numbers. This means you can type them without reaching for modifier keys and symbols, e.g. the shortcut bksl maps to \, shortcut ob to { (open braces) and shortcut eb to } (end braces). The shortcuts are fairly systematic: prefix x for greek, c for upper-case, d for in dollars, h for superscript, l for subscript (high & low), o for in parentheses, f for fraction,... (the order of the prefixes matters).
suffix a for a/alpha,..., u for unfinished/universal, mo for -1,...
so dxcd → $\Delta$ | hct → ^T | hmo → ^{-1} | (tox→(x),... lij→_{ij}` | Have a look at the documentation linked to above for more information although they have been modernised since. In the file (codes.pdf) I have listed some of the building-blocks of the shortcuts to help you guess them.

There are nearly 1600 shortcuts, so I haven't tested them all in this implementation. I have also mostly stopped using Atom, so those snippets are likely to be very buggy. Please raise an issue if you find an error.

They usually need a prefix or suffix to prevent them triggering accidentally. The regular VSCode snippets use ; as a prefix (creating a word boundary is also necessary) and need tab or enter to complete. The Live Snippets do not need a prefix, use ⊔⊔ (double space) as a suffix, and they can complete automatically, if you've set up LaTeX-Utilities that way. I could not find a way to get prefixes and suffixes to work with Atom, so you need to start a new word to start and hit tab/enter to complete. These choices can be customised with the python code in this repo.

Requirements

• Python ≥ 3.5 (for customising)
• VSCode:
  • LaTeX Workshop
  • LaTeX Utilities (for live snippets)
• Atom:
  • language-latex

Installation

You need to copy the snippet JSON/CSON files to your user folder. You probably want to append them to your existing snippets, rather than overwrite them.

• VSCode, normal snippets
  Copy latex.json to your <user folder>/snippets. On Windows <user folder> is %APPDATA%/Code/User (not %USERPROFILE%/.vscode), on Mac it is $HOME/Library/Application Support/Code/User, on Linux it is $HOME/.config/Code/User

• VSCode, Live Snippets
  Copy latexUtilsLiveSnippets.json to your <user folder> (see VSCode instructions). If you do not find a file with the same name already there, copying the file will erase all of the default live snippets. If you want to append instead, you can create a file: in VSCode press Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P on Mac) then start typing Edit Live Snippets File and click on the entry when it appears.
  To enable automatic completion, you need "latex-utilities.liveReformat.enabled": true in your settings.

• Atom
  Copy snippets.cson to your Atom settings folder. By default, on Windows this is %userprofile/.atom. on Mac it is ~/.atom, on Linux it is /home/USER/.atom/.
  If you already have some LaTeX snippets, make sure you combine the old and the new ones under one selector. Otherwise you will disable the old snippets.

My preference is to use the Live Snippets, overwriting the defaults, and enabling live reformat.

Customisation

If you open the jupyter notebook custom.ipynb, you will see the options listed. You can make any changes you want and then run the appropriate cells to generate your file. You might also want to do a bit of editing of data/data.json by hand, removing some entries.

There are some other options that can be chosen in the notebook. You choose a prefix and/or suffix for snippet triggers. You can exclude single/multi-line snippets and create regexes for more complex exclusion rules. There is an option of whether or not to put a tab-stop at the end of every snippet. There is an option of whether to keep track of "maths" and "text" mode snippets (which only has an effect on Live Snippets) or set all modes to "any". You can choose whether to replace $...$ with \(...\) (LaTeX-Utilities does not recognise the contents of $...$ as maths mode). You can choose whether to replace old style {\?? with \text??{ and \math??{ (e.g. ?? = bf), using choice tab-stops for regular snippets and using different snippets in different modes for Live Snippets.

You can see my choices in the branch "my_choices". I use Live Snippets for the single-liners and regular snippets for the multi-liners. I don't use a prefix for the regular snippets, as multi-liners are usually used on their own line. I removed most of the long templates for documents and tables and added some of my own. I also replaced some old-fashioned TeX with the newer versions.