How to get Bibtex Autocompletion in nested files?

[zambuttus]

I was a bit surprised that working with bibliography does not work as expected – and it feels like such a basic problem that I don't expect it to be a general bug.

l verified by reconstructing my problem with the MWE:

• Clean new IDE project with the MWE (my setup: IntelliJ IDEA 2025.1.2 and TeXiFy 0.10.4)
• Creating a new file "subchapter.tex" in the same directory
• Extracting the one-liner of "bibtex-mwe.tex" to "subchapter.tex" and instead include "subchapter.tex" (does not matter whether we use \include or \input here)

The resulting PDF lists the source without any problems (run configuration was automatically created). Meanwhile, the editor cannot autocomplete, cannot resolve already cited stuff and in Bibtex files the entries claim they are not used. The unaltered MWE does not have this problem, where citations happen in the same file as the bibliography commands. Neither waiting for cache updates nor IDE restarts help.

What can be done?

Initially I thought the problem of my own project was that I use subdirectories for the other tex files, but looking into old issues of this repo now gave me the feeling that that should not be a problem. Ultimately, my desired structure (with autocompletion of course!) is:

• Projectdir/
  • includes/
    • layout/
      • front.tex
      • hyphenations.tex
      • preamble.tex
    • 00_abstract.tex
    • 01_introduction.tex
    • 02_related_work.tex
    • ...
  • thesis.tex
  • sources.bib

But currently, only thesis.tex makes citing suggestions, while I do not want any text written there 😅

[PHPirates]

Thanks for raising this issue. Could you try the just released new version 0.11.0?

[zambuttus]

After updating to 0.11.0 I did the usual "Invalidate Cache & Restart" and yeah, seems to work now on two different computers! Thanks, in the case there was something to do 👍

While experimenting, I came across a different, minor, problem in this context: Suggestions are not possible when in the same document an unknown character is placed before, e.g. a non-breaking space of a text passage copied from a web page into the editor, positioned above my cursor – suggestions are still possible above said characters. While the rendering process has no problems, the IDE tells that this is an unexpected character, so the user could make that out.

(My IDEA instances on 2025.1.2 grumpily said "No" 😄 after bumping to 2025.2 it correctly says "No suggestions")

[PHPirates]

Thanks for the feedback! That is indeed very interesting, I never noticed that completion works after certain parser issues but not for others. I'll have a look if it is easy to fix

[zambuttus]

@PHPirates, by the way, seems like there are some more side effects in document sections after invalid characters like non-breaking spaces. I forgot another NBSP somewhere above my cursor and needed an itemize live-template, which was inserted suspiciously because the first \item was not indented. After giving that first item some text and pressing the Enter key, no additional \item was added automatically.

So, the non-breaking space in fact does break some things 🙃

[PHPirates]

Haha, then it's a sometimes-break space character... But it looks like pdflatex compiles fine with NBSP characters, so I just added it to the parser: #4188