Question

I have installed the vim-latex package using Ubuntu Synaptic package manager and updated my .vimrc file following the instructions from the documentation. However, when I open a .tex file in Vim, none of the new menu options appear, and I can’t seem to compile documents using \ll. What did I do wrong?

Answer 1

On Debian (and, hence, Ubuntu), Vim plugins are installed in two steps:

1. The plugin files are installed from the .deb package containing that
   plugin.
2. Symbolic links to those files are created inside ~/.vim/ directories for
   users that would like to use the plugin.

The latter step is supposed to be performed manually by the administrator or
the users themselves via the vim-addons script, which allows to examine all
Vim plugins available in the system (that is, installed from packages), and
check their status, both system-wide and for the current user:

$ vim-addons status

To install a plugin (say, latex-suite), run the command

$ vim-addons install latex-suite

where the last argument stands for the name of the plugin you want to install
(check the output of the previous command to find out the correct name).

If you want to install it system-wide, run the same command as root and add
the -w option. It is rarely recommended to install a plugin system-wide,
though.

Similarly, you can remove a plugin from your ~/.vim/ directory using

$ vim-addons remove latex-suite

Again, vim-addons here does not touch the plugin’s files themselves; it only
removes the links pointing to them.