Vim?

ChrisJohnson

Anyone here using Vim or Neovim? Since I am an ordinary computer user not knowing much about the machine and software I am using, I didn't know about Vim since some weeks ago. First it's been all Greek to me, totally. Anyway, don't know why, but I've given it a try. And boy! - the more I learn about it the more it intriques me. No mouse needed, and it does exactly what you want it to do.

Currently I use neovim and VimR with the vimwiki plugin (which allows you to use wiki links). Linked Marked 2 to it. Seems to me, that I do not need more for my Zettelkasten.

Would love to hear about your experiences.

Cheers -

Chris

Sascha

I have nothing to say other: Please share what you are doing. Since, I am fallen in love with Emacs I consider a side piece (ghetto slang for affair?) named vim.

dbarends

Love Emacs to. {org-mode, Deft, swiper and much more:-)}

doctornerdis

I've been hear a lot about Vim, too. What made you decide to give it a try? How does it compare to something like Sublime Text 3?

michal_h21

Hi, I think that Vimwiki can be used to create a Zettelkasten. In fact, I am working on Vim Zettelkasten plugin based on Vimwiki and FZF. It does just basic things at the moment - it can create new notes using the current date and time as an unique identifier and create links to the notes. The links contain both unique identifier and the note title. Vimwiki hides the identifier, so for example [[171118-1834|Export TikZ to SVG]] is displayed just as Export TikZ to SVG.

I still need to add support for exporting information from the note archive, something like the Outline compiling script, pulling notes to LaTeX documents etc.

rene

Wow, this is awesome!!! I am a long-time vim user and love it because of its pure text mode. I've also made an attempt to create a vim plugin for ZK, however it's in a very infant stage. I don't really know vimscript, so I stuck mostly with what the python API can do. I am super excited about any endeavours turning vim into a Zettelkasten. Please keep up the work and maybe share some of it? Github?

ctietze

Cool stuff! In the rare case that I miss out on this, please make sure to email me @michal_h21 when you find the plugin is presentable enough to be shared on the blog!

michal_h21

@rene said:
I am super excited about any endeavours turning vim into a Zettelkasten. Please keep up the work and maybe share some of it? Github?

This was my first Vimscript project as well. I can't say that it become my favorite language . The code is here: https://github.com/michal-h21/vim-zettel. It depends on Vimwiki and fzf.vim.

There are two ways to create a new notes: the :ZettelNew command will just create a new note, without inserting links anywhere. More useful is the z command. You can just visually select some words, press z and the text will be replaced with link to the new note, which will be immediately opened. The selected text is used as the note title.

You can copy link (file id + title) to the current note using the T command. It is also possible to search for notes using FZF. Just write [[ and search pop will open.

The :ZettelCapture can be used for importing information from the outside. I have a script that can import email to the archive, for example. Other planned use is to create basic records for publications from the reference manager. I use Papis which should be easily scriptable for such task.

I have also some related projects: https://github.com/michal-h21/vimwiki-sync saves every change in the note archive using Git. It also pull and push changes to a remote repository at Vimwiki startup and exit. The change pulling fails for some reason sometimes though, I couldn't find the culprit myself.

The last work in progress is Vimwiki parser in Lua: https://github.com/michal-h21/vimwiki.lua. It doesn't really work yet.

@ctietze said:
Cool stuff! In the rare case that I miss out on this, please make sure to email me @michal_h21 when you find the plugin is presentable enough to be shared on the blog!

Sure, I will post the updates here.

michal_h21

I've updated vim-zettel to support Markdown syntax in Vimwiki. New notes now use YAML header with title and time as a template and links are in Markdown format [title](note name).

ctietze

Great! Good to see progress on the vim front

dgdosen

vim (nvim) user here - I've got vim-zettel running over vimwiki - and it's full-featured, it's a great experience, except for the fact that:

• Images/Ink isn't easy
• I like to have my content with me on phones/pads/multiple computers. In the vim world, that's kind of most easily done via a repo - which is kind of overkill, IMO.

ctietze

@dgdosen FWIW, the iSH.app for iOS comes with Alpine Linux and you can install anything on it, including vim. Then mount a iCloud Drive folder to access notes. -- But input without an external keyboard is not fun I bet for Android you get similar tools aplenty where you can mount cloud storage.