Environment to replace \vbox{\hbox{...}\hbox{...}\hbox{...}\hbox{...}...}

Question

I am using LaTeX (LuaLaTeX,actually) and lately I found myself doing this a lot:

\vbox{%
    \hbox{\strut foo}%
    \hbox{\strut bar}%
    \hbox{\strut baz}%
}

I use it inside tabular environments, floats, on title pages and sometimes even in normal text. When I do this foo, bar and baz are always a lot shorter than, e.g. \linewidth. I found this to be the easiest and quickest thing to get what I want. On special occasions, when there are a lot of items to display I resort to \tabular{l}.

Both constructs look like this is not how LaTeX is supposed to work from an user's perspective. Is there some environment or anything I can use to achieve the same effect as my 5 lines above do? Of course there are for example all the itemizes, but those all have some margin/padding/indent magic about them that always ends up making me want to use Word. My \vbox-\hbox-\strut construct works always as expected, in 100% of my use cases.

Answer 1

Maybe some variety of "long" (rows at fixed baselineskip value) stack would suit your needs.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{stackengine}
\setstackEOL{$}
\setstackgap{L}{\normalbaselineskip}
\strutlongstacks{T}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
\hline
\Longstack[l]{foo$  bar$  baz} & text\\
\hline
\Centerstack[l]{foo$  bar$  baz} & text\\
\hline
\Longunderstack[l]{foo$  bar$  baz} & text\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Answer 2

If you want to write your current construct much shorter, use \halign (and consider using plain TeX).

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\halign{#\crcr foo\cr bar\cr baz\cr}
\end{document}

Answer 3

\input expl3-generic

\ExplSyntaxOn

\cs_new_protected:Npn \vboxofhboxes #1
 {
  \vbox:n
   {
    \clist_map_inline:nn { #1 }
     {
      \hbox:n { \strut ##1 }
     }
   }
 }

\ExplSyntaxOff

\vboxofhboxes{
  foo,
  bar,
  baz,
  OK
}

\bye

I can't really see the advantage over

\begin{tabular}{@{}l@{}}
foo \\
bar \\
baz
\end{tabular}

or similar Plain TeX construction.