I absolutely love LaTeX; and since I’ve started using a Mac for work, I wanted a setup for writing with it.

I settled with installing MacTex, a free re-distribution of TeX Live which also includes Ghostcript and some mac-specific GUI applications. (Don’t judge for not building from source ^^)

However, the goal was to keep using Vim; there’s a bunch of plugins for that like vimtex or vim-latex, but a) I’m not going to learn or use all of their features, since I’m not writing on a day-to-day basis, and b) I didn’t want to slow down my Vim for no reason. I will concede that vimtex looks very cool though, and I’ll be checking it out in the near future.

So, thinking the Unix way, I thought what’s my LaTeX workflow? I keep editor and document side-by-side and

a) Write
b) Compile
c) See PDF change
d) GOTO a

This is easily doable with Vim commands and a nice PDF viewer which will support auto-reloading (eg. evince).
Preview, the default PDF viewer in MacOS, does support auto-reloading;

Version 1

:! pdflatex %

The problem is that Preview will auto-reload the pdf only when you switch focus to the it, which had me alt-tab twice for every change.
This is easily solved with the following command, where MacOS’ open -a will open or focus the instance an application.

Version 2

:! pdflatex % && open -a Preview && open -a iTerm

This way we get the compilation output, but have to press an extra enter key to return. We can solve this by using Vim’s silent option, which will suppress the message box that pops up and reports the result. The problem is that when you run something silently, if it outputs, you’ll have to either use ^L or redraw!, as your screen might be messed up.

So, let’s wrap this up in a proper way; introduce a new command, Silent, which will silently call your arguments and then re-draw the screen; then map this to F5. (Thanks to this vim wiki article.)

Version 3

" Custom Silent command that will call redraw
command! -nargs=+ Silent
\   execute 'silent ! <args>'
\ | redraw!

:map <F5> :Silent pdflatex % && open -a Preview && open -a iTerm

And voila, adding these to .vimrc covered 90% of my day-to-day workflow. How I wish all software was simple to use and modify this way!