Vim For Writing

vim , writing

VIM is great at lots of things, but free form writing has a few gaps in ‘line wrapping’ and ‘distraction free visual beauty’. These gaps can be closed with the plugins Pencil, Goyo and LimeLight.

General

Line wrapping

Pencil makes the motion commands ‘just work’ when you’re in :wrap. When writing paragraphs, you likely want to enable this. Best of all, it doesn’t add pagination to the source file.

:PencilSoft " A works as expected wrapped mode.
:PencilHard " When you want :nowrap behavior.

Distraction Free Visual Beauty

Goyo makes your buffer pretty by centering the writing and getting rid of the status bar. For me, a much more focused experience.

:Goyo   " Toggle Distraction Free mode

Focus on current paragraph

Lime light fades out the background paragraphs. For me, a much more focused experience.

:LimeLight
:LimeLight 0.9 "0.9 -> Make foreground contrast 90%

Spelling and Thesaurus.

You can run the built in spell checker with:

:spell
" ]s,  [s  to jump to next,prev mispelling.
" z= Fix word.

I gotta say, I prefer the aspell checker as it’s faster to replace misspellings:

brew install aspell

You can run the thesaurus with:

\ts (normally \cs if you dont' have nerd commenter)

Markdown

Auto Linting

Use prettier to make your markdown consistent. I execute it as a git precommit hook via husky:

Table of Contents

Use vim-markdown-toc and prettier gaurds as prettier messes with it. See the markdown headers. I also do a ToC sidebar on the viewer (make this page).

Quick switchting via FZF on files, tags and history

See my .vimrc

Tags and tagbar while writing, better then Toc

Super cool - use tagbar and mdctags (see vimrc), way better then :Toc

Installation

Add the following to your _vimrc:

Bundle 'reedes/vim-pencil'
Bundle 'junegunn/goyo.vim'
Bundle 'junegunn/limelight.vim'
Bundle 'Ron89/thesaurus_query.vim'

Happy Vimming