Feature request: improved citation and reference completion about texlab

[efoerster]

Thanks for your great feedback 👍
We have deployed a new version including most of these features. However, we still have some questions:

support for parsing citations from a bibliography added with \bibliography{path/to/bib}

It should work with relative paths. Did you try it with absolute paths? They are not supported yet.

hover support for references and citations: when the user hovers over a reference show the definition

What do you mean with the definition of a reference? (\label{foo} ?)

[tbdcit]

Thanks for the quick response!

I have just built and tested some of the more recent features and can confirm that the following are working as expected:

• completion of \eqref
• completion of \cite with additional dialog showing extra information about the citation (hover support working also)

As for included bib files, I find that none of the following work

\bibliography{/home/user/work/bibliography/bibliography}
\bibliography{../../bibliography/bibliography}
\addbibresource{../../bibliography/bibliography.bib}

where as the following do work as expected

\bibliography{/home/user/work/bibliography/bibliography.bib}
\addbibresource{/home/user/work/bibliography/bibliography.bib}

(note that the first example should not work i.e. latex won't find the bibliography when compiling the file).

hover support for references and citations: when the user hovers over a reference show the definition

What do you mean with the definition of a reference? (\label{foo} ?)

Yes - when the user hovers over a \ref{my-label} it would be useful to see a dialog containing the text in the document where \label{my-label} appears (for example you could just include the line containing \label{my-label} but this wouldn't be very useful for equation references where instead it might be better to show the line containing \label{my-label} and the line that follows it). There is an excellent plugin for org mode in emacs called org-ref that provides such features for both latex and org mode files which might be worth looking at.

[efoerster]

As for included bib files, I find that none of the following work [...]

Including files that are not part of the current workspace should now work correctly.

Yes - when the user hovers over a \ref{my-label} it would be useful to see a dialog containing the text in the document [...]

This can already be done with the "Peek Definition" or "Go To Definition" feature, which most editors provide.

[clason]

Regarding the last comment: One useful possibility that doesn't duplicate existing functionality would be if hover over a reference previewed the formatted reference, i.e.,

• (3.1) for \eqref{eq:iteration-definition},
• 2.4 for \ref{sec:convergence},
• Theorem 4.1 for \cref{thm:error-estimates} (and similarly Equation (3.1) and Section 2.4 if \cref was used instead of \eqref and \ref above).

(Vimtex does this for completion previews. I do find this useful, since sometimes I can remember the tex label, other times only the formatted label when looking for something -- especially in longer projects like books.)