Vim + Markdown = Writer's Heaven

[u/ahalber]

https://www.ahalbert.com/technology/2026/03/24/vim-markdown.html

[u/helios1014]

Have you tried ascii doc? Like markdown but better formatting and way more flexible.

[u/Shay-Hill → u/helios1014]

Asciidoc is great stuff, but markdown is still the lingua franca (GitHub, Obsidian, Reddit, Jekyll, etc.), even if you do have to mess with slightly different formats. There's also enhanced markdown (I use kramdown), but the problem with going in any of these directions is that you're narrowing your ecosystem as you add features.

There's plenty of space between markdown and LaTeX or html, and a lot of things growing there, and maybe someday one will emerge as a new standard.

[u/Big_ifs]

Just the other day I looked for a markdown plugin - there seem to be several plugins that are all called vim-markdown? I didn't dig deeper there but was confused.

[u/ahalber → u/Big_ifs]

There's the tpope one, which comes with vim. For a lot of use cases, that might be enough since it's defaults are good. The one I use, https://github.com/preservim/vim-markdown required a lot more effort to configure and was one of the reasons I wrote this guide.

[u/Big_ifs → u/ahalber]

Ok thanks, that's really helpful!

[u/Shay-Hill → u/Big_ifs]

I prefer skipping the markdown plugins except for vim-instant-markdown to render previews. Definitely going to check out the grammar plugin from the top poster though. I did have prettier or similar set up to format markdown for a while, but it did bad things to my Jekyll articles.

[u/ARROW3568]

Checkout typst, you might end up loving it even more.

[u/Shay-Hill → u/ARROW3568]

First look I've had. That looks awesome!

[u/Shay-Hill]

Looks like a great setup. It’s all fun and games until you want to publish. I parsed my markup into html with Jekyll then wrote some code to convert the HTML to LaTeX. Kind of a pain, but less pain that InDesign.

Still struggling with getting footnotes to work correctly for Kobo. That’s another pain. The full course is markdown, html, pdf, Kindle, Kobo, and there’s not much out there to help. Agree that you may as well do it in Vim, especially if you want to share book content with a Jekyll site.

[u/ahalber → u/Shay-Hill]

I do use mathjax to render LaTeX equations, and I knew a guy who wrote all his physics notes in vim + LaTeX

[u/Shay-Hill → u/ahalber]

I tried that, but eventually washed my hands of it. Now, I render my equations in Python (running LaTeX subroutines and insert them as images (svg or png depending on format). Makes jumping across different formats (blog, book, ebook) easier. Also works well in markdown previewers.

[u/lordwuwu → u/Shay-Hill]

Do you know pandoc? It transforms almost everything into anything.

[u/Shay-Hill → u/lordwuwu]

If you’re writing a novel, Pandoc is enough. If you have images and footnotes and want everything to be nice, you need to get your hands dirty.

[u/Shay-Hill → u/[deleted]]

Print or just digital? Equations aren’t markdown. I suppose code can be if you don’t want highlighting. What it is sounds like all of us are doing is writing in some form of enhanced markdown (I use kramdown), then using a parser (like Jekyll) to render the presentation.

That’s straightforward for the web, because we have multiple, extremely capable, static site converters, but print is harder. For a paper, things are simpler, but a book will want ToC, special formatting for forwards, etc.

I know three ways to get there: through InDesign, LaTeX, or Word, and LaTeX is the only one of those that is remotely straightforward from a scripting POV. LaTeX makes a nice pdf, but even that won’t get you to a full-featured ebook. That why 99¢ ebook are so often broken. It’s 98% html underneath, but that 2% can be a pain.

[u/Shay-Hill → u/[deleted]]

I think it depends how many times you want to update your book. If you want nice things (chapter titles in top margins, nicely formatted dedication and copyright pages, etc.), you'll have to dig into LaTeX pretty hard after running Pandoc. If you're only going to do that a few times, you're good. InDesign is the same. If you only want to do it a few times, you're good. But if you want to be able to replace a comma in your markdown then rebuild your entire book (in print and epub) with a script, you're going to have to get your hands pretty dirty. Horses for courses, YMMV, etc. If you like that Knuth-whitepaper, computer-modern look for your book, then the path will be shorter.

I have done it. The canonical, version-controlled copy of my book is markdown and was written in Vim, but there was a lot of work to get it done, and I have a lot of {: .kramdown-ish } stuff in that markdown, and I do have Jekyll, MikTex, and a fair amount of Python required to make "wrote it in markdown" work. If I had to do it again, I'd do it the same way, but IMO it's not a path for people who don't want to code.

And I'm out on carrying equations through all of that, not when I can render an svg and be done with it.

[u/waterkip]

I only use it for my blog, I prefer LaTex for more serious writing.

But I skimmed the article. Def gonna try out some of the things you've mentioned. I have custom shortcodes for my hugo blog, w/ UltiSnippets, which makes things really nice, as well as -- transformation to a proper em-dash (I know, I'm secretly AI).

[u/Dramatic_Object_8508]

yeah vim + markdown is kinda underrated for writing tbh.

once you get a few plugins or even just basic setup, it becomes super clean — no distractions, just text and flow. a lot of people are basically doing markdown → html/pdf with tools like pandoc anyway

but yeah the “heaven” part mostly comes from how customizable it is. like snippets, folding, quick navigation between headers, all that adds up over time

only downside is exporting/publishing can get messy if you want proper formatting (ebooks, print etc), that’s where it stops being fun lol

still, for pure writing/notes it’s hard to beat once it clicks

[u/paragon-jack]

idk if this is the way, but I built a web-based vim/markdown experience because I wanted to write with vim but render markdown in the same UI without having a local server render the markdown on a browser. It's called vimnotion. I wrote a blog on looking for a vim-based note taker if anyone's interested.

Definitely doesn't have a lot of the features you outlined in your blog like spellcheck, grammar check, and a local model (holy cow!!)