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This is a primer to my LaTeX workflow. It is mostly for myself although I'm glad if others find it useful as well.
- Package manager: Homebrew
- Text editor: MacVim
- TeX distribution: MacTeX
- Compiler: latexmk
- PDF Viewer: Skim
Homebrew makes it easy to manage your commandline packages. For example, you can install MacVim with brew install macvim. You can also install Cask so you can manage graphical applications too, e.g., brew cask install skim.
Vim is the best text editor. Period. It has a ton of excellent features which I'll go into later. MacVim is simply a variant which has a GUI and is natively compatible with the general finickiness of Macs.
MacTeX is the standard distribution for Macs.
latexmk compiles and recompiles your document as many times as necessary. It does other intelligent automatic things which you can google.
Skim refreshes your rendered document live after recompilation, without changing its viewing location. This is in contrast to Preview, which sends you back to the top of the document. There are even better Linux alternatives honestly, although I've found Skim to be the best for Macs.
On making bib files. The best cite key format is kingman1993poisson, following last name of the first author, year of publication, and first word of paper excluding nontrivial things like "The" and hyphens.
On natbib
On Multiple bibliographies
LaTeX plugins in Vim are bloated. Don't use them.
%!TEX root = main.tex
\RequirePackage[l2tabu, orthodox]{nag}
Always place this at the top of your preamble. See explanation.
\renewcommand*\ttdefault{lmvtt}
Replace default Latin Modern typewriter with its proportional counterpart.
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\PPis a colored paragraph symbol, which I place at the beginning of any paragraph to denote that it is incomplete. I've found this to be perfect for drafting documents while retaining its general structure and not ruining it with bleeding red or TODO notes in caps.