writing vim

An awesome-ish list of vim for writers. Geared towards beginners, but hopefully useful for others too.

why
getting started
writing with vim
a note on markup languages
plugins for writing
colorschemes
general vim resources
other resources
contributing

Note:

👍 excellent
👀 new

why

So... why use a text editor for writing over a word processor like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages or Google Docs?

Well, many reasons, but the most important/obvious are:

The separation of text and styling and the productivity boost that comes with that—essentially they force you to focus on the text instead of faffing about with fonts and headings.
They use an open, non-proprietary, plain text file format, meaning you can rely on your files being usable fifty years from now.
Text editors are faster, lighter, and appear less prone to bugs and/or crashes.

You could say the same thing about Notepad, why use vim?

Yes, and if you want to use Notepad or TextEdit or the like, you should. Whatever is most comfortable for you. But with vim, the positives of plain text files also apply to the editor itself. It’s reliable, tested, lightweight and cross platform—it’s available across all operating systems including iOS and Android—and your can use the same config across all your devices. More than that though is the powerful and unrivalled editing language (described in detail in some of the links below) that strives to increase editing effects. Add to that the deep customisability and you can shape vim into a productive and personal tool.

The elephant in the room is Vim’s steep learning curve. And yeah there is no getting around that. But for prose that curve is steep but not high, a two or three runs through vimtutor, the first step on the vim highway, and reading some of the links in general vim, is enough to start. Anyway, I recommend at least reading both Coming home to vim and Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong before deciding in vim is for you.

getting started

The below links show vim can be a powerful and flexible editor of prose, with near endless configuration options. Perhaps too many options. But you don’t need to learn it all at once, especially if your focus is writing prose. Here’s a some simple steps to get started:

Install the GUI version. Either gVim or MacVim. Vim has different shortcuts to other editors, you’ll want the menus as backup when starting out.

Bookmark a quality cheat-sheet and the official documentation. You can access the docs with :h <topic> but I find the online copy is easier to browse. Check the links below.

As we have seen, one of the main benefits of vim is its configurability. But again, for prose, there’s only a few settings you need. For convenience you can download a super minimal vimrc here:

minimal vimrc for writing

This will set up backspacing and word wrapping to work as you would expect in traditional editors.

ALSO use the mouse if you want!

writing with vim

Here is collection of links on using vim for prose. The criteria for this section is that I think the link is interesting (with the usual disclaimer that I do not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed or their authors).

3 shell scripts: Kill weasel words, avoid the passive, remove duplicates - Matt Might 👀
Configuring Vim as a Writing Tool - Its FOSS
English Words Completion inside Neovim/Vim - jdhao
How I'm writing my book using Vim, Git and Ruby - Chris Parsons
Real-time LaTeX using Vim/Neovim, VimTeX, and snippets - ejmastnak
The Woodnotes Guide to Vim for Writers
Using Vim for writing Prose - terminally incoherent
Vim for Writers - NaperWriMo Wiki
Vim for Writing - Vivek
WRITING PROSE IN VIM - ultralight
Writing Markdown in Vim - David Winterbottom
Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim - Vladimir Keleshev
Writing with Vim - Jamie Todd Rubin
Writing, Editing and World-Building at the speed of thought with Vim - Theena Kumaragurunathan
You (probably) don’t need Vimwiki - Joe Reynolds
take notes using LaTeX and Vim - Gilles Castel
using vim to write prose - n3wjack
writing prose in vim - Jonathan Hodgson
Self-publishing a book with reStructuredText, Sphinx, Calibre, and vim Nick Touran 👀

a note on markup languages

While not essential, when writing in plain text you may want to markup your er... text to show emphasis and the like. You’ve heard of Markdown but there’s many markup languages to choose from:

AsciiDoc is both older and a bit more complex than Markdown. It does have some nice features of its own.
Commonmark. With so many flavours of Markdown, I suggest using commonmark to avoid confusion.
Djot is a new attempt at refining Markdown.
Fountain is a markup language for writing screenplays.
LaTex is the grandma of markup languages. Big and intimidating. Used in academia. A little beyond the scope for us.
Typst Typst is a new markup-based typesetting system designed to be “as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use”
txt2tags super minimal markup language
reStructuredText perhaps markdown’s main rival

plugins for writing

Vanilla Vim is more than capable. You can, of course, to customise it to make it fit better into your workflow. Check the documentation for options you may want to enable, and then check out Vim’s plugin ecosystem. This second step is optional.

For information on installing plugins see this video

abolish. Fancy find and replace 👍
ditto. Stop repeating yourself.
fountain4vim is a modern plugin for working with Fountain markup
goyo. Distraction-free writing in Vim. Also limelight by the same author
gundo. Visual undo tree
litecorrect is a small autocorrect plugin for the ~400 most common typos
nrrwrgn. Focus on small region of text
org.vim. Org mode syntax highlighting and folding for Vim
targets.vim. Vim plugin that provides extra text objects
vim-exchange. Swap words when they’re in the order wrong. Vimcasts has a tutorial 👍
vim-fountain Plug-in for writing screenplays in Fountain markup (disclosure: I have contributed to this)
vim-lengthy. Colorize sentences by word count
vim-lexical. Build on Vim’s spell/thes/dict completion
vim-markdown-toc. An easy way to generate a table of contents for your markdown file
vim-online-thesaurus. Thesaurus look up
vim-pandoc. Pandoc integration and utilities for vim
vim-pencil. Rethinking Vim as a tool for writing
vim-textobj-quote. Use ‘curly’ quote characters in Vim
vim-textobj-sentence. Improving on Vim's native sentence text object and motion
vim-wordchipper. Power tool for shredding text in Insert mode
vim-wordy. Uncover usage problems in your writing
vimtex. A modern Vim and neovim filetype plugin for LaTeX files
vimwiki. Personal Wiki for Vim
visual-split.vim. Vim plugin to control splits with visual selections or text objects
writegood. Highlight ‘weasel words’ etc
focus.vim Make a split temporarily full screen

colorschemes

Thousands of colorschemes are available for vim, but most are for dark mode (which I find less suited for long-form writing). Here are some good light themes:

Lucius
Pencil
Solarized8
Paramount
Paige
Bruin
vim-paper 👀
vim-no-color-collection Collection of Vim themes with barely any colors

general vim resources

other resources

The if you liked that you'll like this section:

Using Git Version Control as a Writer
Write plain text files
Vale: enforcing style guidelines for text
Improve your writing with the GNU style checkers 👀
Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system 👀

contributing

Suggestions are welcome! Please create an issue.

phantomdiorama/writingvim

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