vim-overleaf

Edit Overleaf document from vim, with synchronization features.

Here is an animation showing the plugin features:

Disclaimer

Backup your data. This script was quickly written in a few hours, there's no guarantee.

There are some other features, but undocumented features may change later. (documented features may also change)

Installation

Install merge3 and selenium Python library.

Install the plugin as usual.

You need to download Google Chrome browser and the chromedriver executable.

Usage

• Open any file.
• Execute :OverleafOpenBrowser.
• Navigate to an Overleaf project.
• Execute :OverleafConnect. At this point if the text in the browser and the editor are not equal then the editor text will be overwritten with the browser text, nevertheless using the undo feature in Vim suffices.
• Commands :OverleafDisconnect and :OverleafRecompile are available.

Note that :OverleafRecompile is a no-operation when there's no connection.

You may want to make your own key bindings.

If in the file there's a line with content such as

% overleaf-project-url: https://overleaf.com/project/abcdef

then that URL will be opened in the browser when :OverleafOpenBrowser is executed.

Configuration

Set the following global variables in .vimrc as usual.

If they're not set, they will be set to some reasonable default value once the plugin is loaded.

• g:vim_overleaf_userdata_dir: directory to the userdata directory. Will contain Chrome profile.
• g:vim_overleaf_driver_path: path to the chromedriver file.
• g:vim_overleaf_updatetime: time for check update, in seconds.

Internal implementation note

I tried three_merge library as well but...

from three_merge import merge
merge("zzzz", "bcde", "bcd")

results in an infinite loop.

Using Python thread and modify Vim data structures from Python's non-main thread leads to Vim internal errors. Trying to use Vim's timer_start() instead.