As a follow-on to my ConfigParser sugar for the ever-awesome Espresso, I’ve written a workable sugar that turns Espresso into a full-featured LaTeX editor. Syntax highlighting, basic itemizers, templates for figures, tables, and common documents, plus code completion for a large number of commonly used LaTeX functions.

The code is hosted on GitHub; I’d appreciate a comment if you’re using the Sugar, just to help keep me motivated to work on the thing. Similarly, if you feel like contributing I’d love to accept patches or pull requests.

I’ve recently fallen in love with MacRabbit’s lovely new text editor for OS X, Espresso. For one, it’s a fantastic editor — not quite as swiss-army-esque as the stalward TextMate, but close. Unlike TextMate, Espresso is downright gorgeous — and gorgeous in a way that doesn’t interfere with actually using the thing. A great tool, beautifully designed, and with a deliciously extensible core to boot.

Naturally, this last bit is what really got me hooked. Espresso plugins are called ‘Sugars’, and can provide truly ludicrous extensions to the editor. Want to add a syntax highlighter for a new language? Specialized code folding for a certain coding idiom? Autocomplete and suggestion tools for a library? You can do it, and (almost) entirely in XML. Beautiful.

The first thing I did after downloading the trial version was hunt around for relevant Sugars, which I found to be somewhat sparse. Espresso is, unfortunately, quite a young editor. For instance, I couldn’t find a Sugar for working with configuration files produced/read by Python’s ConfigParser module — something I desperately need for a super-secret project I’m working on. Several hours of reading, writing, and frantic github searching later, I present:

ConfigParser.sugar

An Espresso Sugar providing syntax highlighting for configuration files layed out according to RFC 822. Among other things, it understands Windows .ini files and config files produced by Python’s ConfigParser module.

Installation

Clone the Github project somewhere, with the following:

git clone git://github.com/doches/ConfigParser.sugar.git ./ConfigParser.sugar

And then link it to your syntaxes directory:

ln -s "$(pwd)/ConfigParser.sugar" "/Users/$(whoami)/Library/Application Support/Espresso/Sugars/"

Alternately, you could download the zipped current version. I won’t be updating that quite as often though, and due to Espresso’s relatively young age Sugars tend to change rather often.