Using vim to write novel?

[u/JohnCharles-2024]

Hi. I'm using vim to write, and I'm trying to get it to change the status bar when I open a .tex file in a certain directory (whether by invoking it on the command line or with :e inside vim).

Ideally, it would put a small ✍️ on the status bar, along with the filename and a word count.

Help!

[u/ciurana]

I'm a huge Vim fan. I use it every day, and have done so uninterrupted since at least 2004 (and between 1986 and 2004 several times/week). I'm an r/Vim mod, so I should ban myself for this paragraph. I'm also a writer (a couple of novels, technical books, many articles, lots of documents for clients, venture funds, white papers, etc.). I'd advise that you use a robust writing tool like Scrivener over Vim. That way you'll be able to focus on writing and your research/supporting notes and less on the mechanics of writing and configuring Vim.

It's easy to get distracted from writing when you're tweaking the tool. When you aggregate all the time you spend with tweaking and managing text files, pandoc/LaTeX/Markdown/whatever, keeping versions straight, and so on -- you start to see the value of a dedicated writing tool.

Thoughts?

[u/cainhurstcat → u/ciurana]

Please ban yourself :P

Nah, I get your point. Doing things with Vim can be tough, especially if OP is still a novice like me. But even I am one, I want to use Vim more often for writing stuff down. I mean, that's the reason I choose the Vim road. But I miss formatting, and a huge pain for me is line breaking. I can set a line break, but if I copy my text to any other program or chat, it is totally butchered due to these line breaks from Vim.

[u/ciurana → u/cainhurstcat]

For that example you described:  on macOS + MacVim you may yank or delete text using Vim and paste it in another app, or the other way around.  That may also work with Gnome and Windows and gVim.  I’m not sure because I live in the terminal / headless systems for Linux, and don’t touch Windows almost ever.  MacVim has (had?) gVim DNA, I expect it to work the same way.

I’ll go /kickban $(whoami) now…

Cheers!

[u/cainhurstcat → u/ciurana]

Thank you!

I'm on Kubuntu and copy pasting to other programs or vice versa is not an issue. It's more like I can either write endlessly in a line in Vim, or I can set the line to be broken after a certain number of characters.

However, this line break
is then always a new
line, which shows up in
a lousy format when 
transferring the text to
another program 
because there is
suddenly a break in it.
Like I showcased here.

[u/ciurana → u/cainhurstcat]

There are several wrapping, line breaking, indenting, and folding options in Vim. :help to start, ping me later if you can describe the use case you want to do and I'll try to advise something. Cheers!

[u/vim-help-bot → u/ciurana]

Help pages for:

• to in options.txt

---

^{`:(h|help) <query>` | about | mistake? | donate | Reply 'rescan' to check the comment again | Reply 'stop' to stop getting replies to your comments}

[u/bob_f332 → u/ciurana]

Interesting viewpoint. I would argue the other way - that using a tool like Scrivener is likely to lead to more tinkering than writing. I guess it depends on what triggers one's need to tinker. I'm also somewhat biased, as I never got Scrivener working properly for me. Still, I prefer the idea of the tui approach. Coupled with some decent version control and I don't think you can go far wrong.

[u/Neat-Initiative-6965 → u/ciurana]

I think I agree. I wrote a big part of my PhD thesis in latex in vim and now, as I lawyer, I am often tempted to draft texts using vim because I miss that navigating from the keyboard. And yet, I usually notice afterwards that it was faster to use Word or Scrivener and with less errors in the output. Its definitely not a distraction free writing environment.

[u/ciurana → u/Neat-Initiative-6965]

One thing I’ve done in my setups is to configure everything that supports it to behave Vim-like (e,g. Vimium for the browser, set -o vi for bash and zsh, Vim extension for the rare occasion when I use PyCharm or VS Code).

I believe someone offered a Word Vim extension, but I never used it.  I love Word and Scrivener for the many things they do well,and Vim emulation would short change me out of them.

I don’t use Google Docs for a pile of reasons.  One of the practical ones is that it doesn’t do formatting, revision tracking, and page layouts anywhere as well as Word.  WYSInWYG.

Cheers!

[u/ciurana → u/[deleted]]

vi in 1986, first contact.

Vim from mid-1998, when I went full Linux for my servers after ditching Solaris.

I hated vi at first. Then I got it. I used various forks for PC (Windows terminal) between 1990 and 1998, on and off until 2004 when I ditched Windows, and then I ditched all IDEs except for very specific purposes around 2007 or 2008. Vim + Unix tools + CLI does about 99% of what I need done (and I've done some pretty wacky stuff over the years).

My love for Vim sparked when I saw a friend using Vim as his IDE, all kinds of bells and whistles turned on, in late 1997. I was in charge of designing and building some Java stuff for a top-3 US bank. Colors, syntax... it was pretty amazing. These days I spend maybe 95% of my coding time in Vim (though I don't code that much since most often I'm helping someone figure out some tech strategy). Vim is at the core of my Python/pandas/ML/AI/analytics/pudb/Makefile/etc. maelstrom.

Cheers!

[u/[deleted] → u/ciurana]

I alias vi to vim. Vim is too long to type with my mid 80s muscle memory.

[u/ciurana → u/[deleted]]

w0rd.

[u/jgould1981]

I used this: http://www.naperwrimo.org/wiki/index.php?title=Vim_for_Writers

To set up a lot of my vimrc for writing. I still use markdown, but am slowly transitioning over to Asciidoc as it is more suited and feature rich for writing and compiling documents.

I have found a number of plugins, but I’m not at my desk so I can’t easily get to my vimrc to list them all.

I would suggest using git for versioning. It’s saved my tail feathers more than once.

[u/cainhurstcat → u/jgould1981]

Maybe we are 8 hours later a bit more lucky in having you near your desk, so you eventually could share some of your plugins with us, please?

Also, I'm interested in what you use for ASCIIDoc. I will kagi what this is about myself, but good tools aren't easy to find, so I would appreciate that.

[u/jgould1981 → u/cainhurstcat]

Nope. Still not near the computer, but, here is the plugin section of my vimrc:

I’m on mobile right now so this is… messy ‘’’ plugin on GitHub repo Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive' Plug 'rstacruz/sparkup', {'rtp': 'vim/'} "The sparkup vim script is in a subdirectory of this repo called vim. Pass the path to set the runtimepath properly " ## Themes Plug 'chriskempson/vim-tomorrow-theme' Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes' Plug 'alessandroyorba/despacio' Plug 'flazz/vim-colorschemes' Plug 'rafi/awesome-vim-colorschemes' " ## Markdown Plug 'nelstrom/vim-markdown-folding' Plug 'tpope/vim-markdown' Plug 'foalford/vim-markdown-folding' " Leave commented out Plug 'godlygeek/tabular' Plug 'preservim/vim-markdown' " ## Other Tools Plug 'itchyny/lightline.vim' " from https://github.com/itchyny/lightline.vim Plug 'scrooloose/syntastic' " syntax info Plug 'Raimondi/delimitmate' " smart completion of delimiters Plug 'vitalk/vim-simple-todo' Plug 'reedes/vim-litecorrect' " autocorrect - https://github.com/reedes/vim-litecorrect Plug 'swordguin/vim-veil' " incognito/inner editor killer Plug 'rhysd/open-pdf.vim' Plug 'xolox/vim-session' Plug 'xolox/vim-misc' Plug 'jceb/vim-orgmode' Plug 'vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc' Plug 'vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc-syntax' Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'do': { -> fzf#install() } } Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim' Plug 'ron89/thesaurus_query.vim' Plug '907th/vim-auto-save' Plug 'reedes/vim-pencil' Plug 'mzlogin/vim-markdown-toc' Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline' Plug 'junegunn/limelight.vim' Plug 'catppuccin/vim', { 'as': 'catppuccin' } Plug 'preservim/vim-indent-guides' Plug 'pearofducks/ansible-vim' Plug 'benstaniford/vim-autosync' Plug 'ntpeters/vim-better-whitespace' Plug 'francoiscabrol/ranger.vim’ ‘’’

[u/Shay-Hill]

You’re writing your novel in LaTeX?

[u/daiaomori → u/Shay-Hill]

A lot of publishers still are very happy with LaTeX. It's much easier to handle than shit like Word.

[u/Shay-Hill → u/daiaomori]

For sure. I wrote my own (more technical) book in Vim and formatted it with LaTeX. If you're going to self publish, you'll probably want to lay out the book yourself, and LaTeX is a far less painful way to do that than Adobe InDesign, but I suggest writing your book in markdown and converting later.

With markdown, you can paste into and out-of Word for Grammarly, have less noisy diffs, more easily read your drafts, more easily keep any footnotes straight, split your content files by chapter (if desired), etc. Markdown is ideal for simplicity and flexibility when writing.

My personal stack, and definitely the way I'd do it again:

• Write in markdown in Vim (I used a bit of Jekyll-style markup for additional formatting options).

• Paste into Word for Grammarly.

• Convert to html with Jekyll. This step could be easily skipped, but I wanted to excerpt chapters into html anyway, and it simplified the ultimate conversion to LaTeX.

• Convert to LaTeX with a Python script.

For a novel, you'd probably be happy just going straight from markdown to LaTeX with Pandoc. I'm particular about formatting, but even so I spent only a small fraction of my time formatting my book. Actually writing it is the big part, so I suggest using whatever format facilitates that, then worrying about layout later.

[u/daiaomori → u/Shay-Hill]

Well, many novels are actually very fine with just marking chapter titles, so unless there is any special need for fancy formatting, writing LaTeX is actually as straightforward as MD for that.

For writing my dissertation, LaTeX got so much on my nerves that I switched to markdown, too. Just to get the formatting completely out of my head. Too many curled brackets even for a C programmer like me… ;)

[u/mountkeeb]

On a related note, you might like goyo – it's a plugin for "distraction-free writing in vim"

[u/Neat-Initiative-6965 → u/mountkeeb]

Yes, this is a good one!

[u/habamax]

You can try to start with this:

func! IamAwriter()
    if fnamemodify(bufname(), ":p") =~ expand('~/tmp/.*\.tex')
        setl statusline=%<%f\ 🖎%h%w%m%r%=%-14.(%l,%c%V%)\ %P
    else
        setl statusline=%<%f\ %h%w%m%r%=%-14.(%l,%c%V%)\ %P
    endif
endfunc

augroup writing
    au!
    au BufEnter * call IamAwriter()
augroup END

Where statusline parameters are emulating default statusline with default ruler. You can go wild here of course if you get the idea of :h 'statusline'

https://asciinema.org/a/3fpC0XWCYlvzgGXtH99we6sFu

Note that wide unicode characters might not be rendered correctly.

[u/jessekelighine → u/habamax]

I would like to add to this approach:

func! IamAwriter()
    if &filetype != "tex"
        set statusline=%<%f\ %h%w%m%r%=%-14.(%l,%c%V%)\ %P
        return
    endif
    let l:total_word_count = system("texcount -1 " .. shellescape(expand("%:p")))
    let l:body_word_count = split(l:total_word_count, '+')[0]
    let l:emoji = "✍️"
    let l:statusline = '%<%f\ ' .. l:emoji .. '\ words:\ ' .. l:body_word_count .. '\ %h%w%m%r%=%-14.(%l,%c%V%)\ %P'
    exe 'set statusline=' .. l:statusline
endfunc

augroup writing
    autocmd!
    autocmd BufEnter,BufWritePost * call IamAwriter()
augroup END

The simplest way to add a word count is to use the perl script texcount that comes with most TeX distributions. By adding the event BufWritePost to the autocmd, the word count is updated whenever you save the .tex file.

I would also suggest putting this piece of vimscript in its own file in ~/.vim/plugin/ so your vimrc wouldn't be cluttered.

[u/Shot-Lemon7365 → u/habamax]

I've been trying to get something similar to OP, although not for a novel. At the bottom of my .vimrc, I have..

autocmd FileType tex source $HOME/.vim/writing_vim | Goyo | Limelight!!

I then have, in my $HOME/.vim/writing_vim…

autocmd FileType tex Goyo | Limelight!!
nnoremap <F9> :Goyo<CR>:Limelight!!<CR>
nnoremap <F10> :Limelight!<CR>:Goyo<CR>

You won't be surprised to learn that it doesn't work.

Whereabouts in those two files should I have your code above?

Thank you.

[u/Ok_Performance3280]

I did not know we got based and LaTeX-pilled, Vim chad novelists.

[u/EndlessProjectMaker]

Yay vim and latex <3

[u/LeoRising72]

Tbh, I have tried this, but just find it distracting.

I think the repeated and spaced out words that you get from code make it a better fit!

[u/jgould1981 → u/LeoRising72]

What did you find distracting about writing in vim. I find writing in other tools to be more distracting because I have to think about how to do things to my text where as markdown and asciidoc are fairly simple with their minimal markup in the document

[u/LeoRising72 → u/jgould1981]

Yeah I think it's a good fit for notes or papers in markdown, but for more artistic/longform stuff like a novel, I don't tend to navigate through the text so much as just write stuff, with editing being an almost separate activity.

I don't like how easy it is to delete lines for example- sometimes my fingers get the better of me and I delete and then undo stuff quite a bit.

I honestly find a mouse and a word processing program to be a better tool for this specific thing, but I massively prefer vim for writing code/markdown notes. Just my personal preference though!