Re: Shell based text editor for writing prose
On 02 Apr 2003, Joey Hess wrote:
> John Griffiths wrote:
> > what I'm after is a recommendation from others who might have used
> > something like this to write 5,000 word plus english language documents.
>
> I've had no problems writing documents in that range with vim. Folding
> becomes fairly useful after a while, if it's all in one file. I've
> probably never exceeded 10 thousand words in a single document; though
> I've written several systems of documents in the 150-200 thousand word
> range, using vim.
>
> > most debian editors, understandably, are aimed at writing code, not prose.
>
> Remember that one of the first purposes unix was put to was writing
> English text (for patent applications). So the unix toolkit is less
> code-oriented than you might at first think.
>
> Most unix text editors cannot (easily?) be set up to reflow a paragraph
> automatically if you edit it somewhere in the middle. In vim this means
> a bit too much typing of the gqip command when editing a paragraph to
> reflow it. Like changing modes, this becomes second nature -- I've
> probably done it at least twice while composing this paragraph.
>
[snip]
But of course you don't have to type gqip to do this. You simply map the
command to a key combination. I have it mapped to Alt-f. I find I prefer
this to the automatic formatting that happens with word processors.
I write prose a lot: several full-length books of about 50,000 and a lot
of shorter stuff. I think I've tried most of the available editors and
have always come back to vim. I'm sure emacs is equally good but it's
too complex and unwieldy for my needs. Vim does everything I need and
more and has the advantage that it loads quickly when needed. The main
objection I see mentioned is that it is a modal editor. This doesn't
worry me since the word processor I used to write within DOS was also
modal (Protext), but if you feel strongly about it you can set vim to
work constantly in insert mode. I don't find this is necessary; I have
it set so that the cursor changes colour and shape in the different
modes (and its mode is also indicated at the bottom of the screen.
AC
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