vim-mplus

Vim plugin for Mplus statistical software files (.inp and .out).

Features

• Syntax highlighting for keywords, commands, model operators, section headers, and comments
• Syntax-based folding for input sections and output blocks
• Indentation (section headers at column 0, body indented)
• Omni-completion (<C-x><C-o>) for all Mplus keywords via syntaxcomplete
• UltiSnips snippets for common analyses (CFA, SEM, LGM, LCA, and more)

Formatter (gq)

Mplus is case-insensitive and allows keywords to be abbreviated to four or more characters, IS/ARE to be used in place of =, and section headers to share a line with their content. This flexibility means input files written by different people—or pasted from different sources—can look wildly inconsistent. The gq formatter normalises a selection (or the whole file with gggqG) into a canonical style:

• Uppercase all code — Mplus convention; makes keywords stand out from variable names.
• Expand abbreviations — e.g. ANAL: → ANALYSIS:, ESTI → ESTIMATOR. Only unambiguous 4+ character abbreviations are expanded.
• Split section headers — DATA: FILE = ex.dat; becomes two lines (DATA: on its own line, body indented below) so each section is clearly delimited and folds correctly.
• Replace IS/ARE with = — all three are interchangeable in Mplus; = is shorter and more common.
• Normalise whitespace — tabs → 4 spaces, trailing whitespace removed.
• Re-indent — section headers at column 0, body at one shiftwidth.

TITLE sections and comments are left alone (whitespace cleanup only). The formatter also sets fileformat=unix and fileencoding=utf-8 to avoid encoding issues across platforms.

Installation

vim-plug:

Plug 'li-ruijie/vim-mplus'

lazy.nvim:

{ 'li-ruijie/vim-mplus', ft = { 'mplus-inp', 'mplus-out' } }

Or copy the contents to your Vim runtime directory.

Commands

Command	Description
:Mout	Open corresponding .out file in vertical split
:Mrun	Run Mplus on current file (Windows/Linux)

Snippets

Requires UltiSnips. Type the trigger and press <Tab> to expand.

Trigger	Description
inp	Full input file skeleton
sec	Generic section header
cfa	Confirmatory factor analysis
sem	Structural equation model
lgm	Latent growth model
lca	Latent class analysis
gmm	Growth mixture model
mlm	Multilevel (TWOLEVEL) model
efa	Exploratory factor analysis
mc	Monte Carlo simulation
mi	Multiple imputation

License

GPL-3.0