Question

As a programmer by heart, if not by profession, I increasingly rely on, nay live in VIM for most editing-related tasks. What tips can you offer for using (almost) everyone’s favorite editor for editing general-purpose text, say, an article? I mean plain text, with minimal markup using Markdown or RST; I’m not looking for support for LaTeX or for entering mathematical formulae.

Answer 1

I enable soft-wrapping when I’m editing most text files:

:set wrap

If you decide to do the same, then you’ll want to know about gj and gk in normal mode, to move by screen lines instead of physical lines. I use them so often I remapped the up and down arrow keys to them instead of k and j.

Whether you’re editing hard- or soft-wrapped files, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of gqap (or its cousin gwap) to re-wrap a single paragraph with hard newlines, and vipJ to join all the lines of a hard-wrapped paragraph back into a single line.

You might also want to consider including a in formatoptions, to enable automatic paragraph formatting:

:set formatoptions+=a

When you’re doing all this wrapping and unwrapping, it’s nice to keep Vim from mangling numbered lists:

:set formatoptions+=n

In fact, I’d suggest reviewing all the formatoptions and adjusting them to your particular preferences:

:help fo-table

More info:

:help gj
:help gk
:help gqap
:help auto-format
:help formatoptions