LaTeX-Expansions for Sublime Text 3

Installation from the command line is explained below, but if you'd like you can copy the file however you wish to the Install directory: C:\Users\<YOURUSERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 3\Packages\LaTeXTools

This JSON file can be used in Sublime Text 3 by LaTeX-Tools to increase the efficiency of your writing not only with initiating/navigating/closing of LaTeX environments but also in reducing the time spent typing common terms. This config has been designed with Chemistry in mind but the potential for increasing this project's scope is very broad.

Expansions are triggered by typing a short field of text, (the snippet) of text and pressing Tab to expand the snippet to its defined field, (the expansion). For example in the .gif illustration above, typing "sup" then pressing Tab auto-fills the field to \textsuperscript{}, what's more, the cursor automatically knows to move to within the curly braces so that you can fill them, and pressing tab again moves the cursor outside the braces when you've finished filling the braces.

Principles

A few guiding principles for how the expansions should be structured are as follows:

Snippets should be short (this is meant to save time, right?)
Snippets should not be so general as to be confusing (e.g - Avoid things like "subs" for \textsubscript{} because this could be mistaken for expanding to \subsection
Expansions should intuitively follow from the content of the snippet
1. Users should be able to by-in-large predict the expansion just given the snippet, or at least, not be shocked by the expansion which results. This helps users having to learn by rote which snippets create which expansions
Expansions should be feature-complete (if you're unsure with whether or not to add certain fields like \label{} for example, err on the side of adding it)
Snippets should be internally consistent, that is, if adding a new snippet which is related to another snippet, it should be assigned logically
1. For example, considering "sec" expands to "\section{}", "ssec" should be used to expand to \subsection{} and "sssec" (NOT 2sub or similar) should be used to expand to \subsubsection{}
Expansions should be intelligent
1. $n can be used iteratively to move the cursor following pressing Tab with $0 being the final position. This should be used so the the user can tab their way through the expansion from beginning to end in a thought-through manner
2. Line breaks (by using \n should be employed where appropriate, for example \\section{$1}\n$0is preferred over \\section{$0}\n or worse again, \\section{}
Because JSON does not permit comments, line breaks separate clusters of related snippets

Include multiple variants where possible to maximise user flexibility

For the example of the expansion "nausea and vomiting", the following variants were included

{ "trigger": "NandV", "contents": "Nausea and Vomiting"},
{ "trigger": "Nandv", "contents": "Nausea and vomiting"},
{ "trigger": "nandv", "contents": "nausea and vomiting"},
{ "trigger": "n&v", "contents": "nausea \\& vomiting"},
{ "trigger": "N&V", "contents": "Nausea \\& Vomiting"},
{ "trigger": "N/V", "contents": "Nausea \\& Vomiting"},
{ "trigger": "n/v", "contents": "nausea \\& vomiting"},

In this example, there are variants for not only alternate capitalisations, but also for & vs and.

Install Directions

Windows

Open a command prompt window and type the following

cd '~\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 3\Packages\LaTeXTools'

git clone https://github.com/CillySu/LaTeX-Expansions

cp '.\LaTeX-Expansions\LaTeX.sublime-completions' .\

And finally, optionally... rmdir .\LaTeX-Expansions\

Expanding Scope

Areas of interest for the time being include

Medical acronyms and terminology
Optimising LaTeX
Physics

Dependencies

Sublime Text (3 is tested, YMMV using ST2)
LaTeX-Tools
A working LaTeX distribution (not required technically but most users will need this)