How can I turn Vim LatexSuite on Manually?

Question

VLS's commands such as ^J and F5 do not work always for me inside Vim so how can turn VLS manually or do some other tricks to get VLS working more often? The word "often" could mean that VLS gets triggered with every *.tex -ended file. Also, how can I see whether the VLS is even enabled?

$ cat ~/.vimrc

filetype plugin on
set modeline
set modelines=20

Perhaps related

1. Help me to write Long LaTeX equations fast with colours and possibly with other aids

2. http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/

Answer 1

Maybe you did not really install Latex-Suite? I'm using Ubuntu and I noticed that it is not sufficient to install Latex-Suite using:

sudo apt-get install vim-latexsuite

For the actual installation you have to use Vim's addon manager:

vim-addons install latex-suite

Answer 2

This might solve your Problem:

http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/index.php?subject=faq&title=FAQ#faq-not-loaded-vim7

Look under the Question: "Why is vim-latex is no longer loaded when I open an empty .tex file after I upgraded to Vim 7?"

There is also this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1970544/vim-how-to-manually-load-an-ftplugin-after-startup

Short answer: Both things you are trying to do should be possible.

Answer 3

Although gabkdlly's link answers your question, I'll post some explanation on why vim is behaving the way it behaves.

Normally, vim does filetype detection based on file extension. The .tex extension is shared by LaTeX, ConTeXt, plain TeX, and ePlain; so a simple filetype detection based on extension does not work. To circumvent this, vim checks for the file contents to see what type of a file it is: if the file contains a \begin{...} most likely it is a LaTeX file, if it contains \start... most likely it is a ConTeXt file, otherwise vim cannot be sure and it defaults to g:tex_flavor. The default value of g:tex_flavor is plain.

When you open a new .tex file, no keywords are found, so vim assumes that it is a plaintex file. To default to other formats, use one of the following:

let g:tex_flavor = "plain"
let g:tex_flavor = "context"
let g:tex_flavor = "latex"

Note that some files might be misrecognized by the simplistic algorithm used by vim. If you want to ensure that a file is detected correctly, set filetype in a vim modeline:

% vim: ft=plaintex " For plain 
% vim: ft=context  " For context
% vim: ft=tex      " For LaTeX