Tip #274: Some useful mappings for TeX

You know, TeX requires a lot of additional formatting code. I'm tired of opening and closing braces, brakets,
\beginning and \ending etc. I particularly hate typing \begin and \end.
To help myself and to save a few(not a few) keystrokes I naturaly came up to some solutions, which I wish to share with
other TeXnicians and TeXperts whhich use Vim.
"===============================cut here=========================
"=============== you can put it in ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/tex.vim ===============
"
" Note: i_<C-L>
" This constructs a skeleton of a TeX environment.
" You write a line like this:
" floatingfigure:ht<C-L>
" and after you press <C-L>, you get:
"
" \begin[ht]{floatingfigure}
"
" \end{floatingfigure}
" -- INSERT --
"
" where floatingfigure is the desired environment
" ht are options
" : is delimiter; in fact, you can use whatever delimiter you want
" as long it is not in &iskeyword; option.
inoremap <buffer> <C-L> 
\:s/[^][:alnum:]<bar>]\+/,/eg
\I\begin{ea}[A]%d%%P
\:s/\[,/[/e
\:s/,]/]/e
\:s/\[]//e
\0f{y%o\endpO
inoremap <buffer> { {}i
inoremap <buffer> [ []i
inoremap <buffer> ^ ^{}i
inoremap <buffer> _ _{}i
inoremap <buffer> \( \(\)hi
inoremap <buffer> \[ \[\]hi

" Note: v_<C-L>
" For this to work, you have to write on a blank line the name of
" the desired environment and options (see i_<C-L>) and visual select
" (from top to bottom) this and following lines.
" After pressing <C-L> the selected lines will be surrounded
" with begin/end skeleton of the environment.
vnoremap <buffer> <C-L> o
\:s/[^][:alnum:]<bar>]\+/,/eg
\I\begin{ea}[A]%d%%P
\:s/\[,/[/e
\:s/,]/]/e
\:s/\[]//e
\0f{y%gvoo\endp
" vnoremap <buffer> { di{}P
" vnoremap <buffer> [ di[]P
vnoremap <buffer>  di^{}P
vnoremap <buffer>  di_{}P
vnoremap <buffer> \( di\(\)hP
vnoremap <buffer> \[ di\[\]hP

" This makes "two spaces after a comma" before every :write
au BufWritePre *.tex %s/,\(\S\)/, \1/ge

"==================== You can put this in your ~/.vimrc ========================
" If cursor is inside braces and not before comma, blank or opening brace,
" exit the brace block and stay in insert mode.
" If cursor is outside braces, it inserts a space or perform an abbreviation
" as normal.
function! CleverSpace()
let CharOnCursor = strpart( getline('.'), col('.')-2, 1)
let CharAfterCursor = strpart( getline('.'), col('.'), 1)
if CharOnCursor !~ ',\|\s\|(' && CharAfterCursor =~ ')\|]\|}'
normal x
endif
endfunction
inoremap <Space> <Space>:call CleverSpace()<LF>a

" I use the last function not only for LaTeX but also in C sources.

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