non-word characters in tags

Question

I have tags (generated with ctag) of the form

eq:local-canonical-form

Now:

1. because of the : I cannot use eq:loc<c-x><c-]> to expand the tag.
2. because of the : and the - I cannot use <c-]> to jump to its definition...

Any ideas how to overcome this?

Answer 1

By default, in vim (and most other editors) : and - separate words. This means word/tag completion do not complete eq:loc<c-x><c-]> but only loc<c-x><c-]>. If there is no tag loc..., nothing happens.

You can fix this by placing

setlocal iskeyword+=:
setlocal iskeyword+=-

in ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/tex.vim and/or ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/rmd.vim (rmd=rmarkdown).

However, this might have surprising side effects. For instance, if you have the equation a-b:2, it is now treated as a single word.

The situation in latex is known to be complicated:

You can't get all LaTeX strings right using iskeyword, that is because the iskeyword works on characters and some characters may have different meanings in different contexts. (from iskeyword for latex)

Someone already asked the question iskeyword with context. But the answer is not affirmative to solve this issue.