#VimConf2021

[@theena]

Hi everyone. I've started a Git Repo to create a community-curated .vimrc for writing and writers. It is called OVIWrite: github.com/MiragianCycle/OVIWrite Please feel free to contribute. Contributions encouraged and welcome. Thanks again for everyone reaching out to me over email and on reddit with encouragement and motivation to work on this.

[@MrG0CE]

U NEED TO DISCOVER LATEX !!!

[@medicineessentialssimplifi2034]

Thanks

[@shoryaagarwal561]

"What does one do when you have plenty of time , you distro hop" - Theena Kumaragurunathan

[@adityams1659]

*He uses vim better than most programmers do!*

[@desubakadesu]

lmoa, true

[@KnjazNazrath]

Numbers equating to the emotional state of characters at different parts of the story? Literally mind-blowing. Lets one spark memories of the reasons behind the emotions without having to re-read swathes of text. I'm at part x, character y is at 5, why was that? Oh yeah, they just had to deal with situation z. That's amazing, and I'm stealing it to repurpose for my "two novels smushing one war from two perspectives" project. Thanks so much for the amazingly utilitarian psychological workflow hack!

[@theena]

Glad to hear you found it useful. Do let me know if you have questions.

[@tonyramirez5707]

This man has the warmest most pure smile I've ever seen. Listening to you talking with such passion about your craft and the tools you learned to use kept a smile from ear to ear in my face the whole time. If you ever do more content related to your workflow or more amazing tools I wouldn't miss it for anything.

[@GOZES]

This so amazing. As a developer with writing aspiration I would love to see more in depth video on your vim + orgmode writing workflow please

[@theena]

I am working on it!

[@kingjulians1]

Thanks 👍

[@HeadCodeMonkey82]

That was fantastic to see vim used outside of programming, I also love to see the different plugins you use. I have been using vim for 15 years and still refining my setup! I also really liked to see how you have your world bible and references and how you navigate them, I always wondered how authors kept all of that consistent through a story!

[@MartinsTalbergs]

If you need something, a plugin or anything for your workflow, let us know. We will bring that heaven down to your feet. Your imagination here is the limit.

[@theena]

Haha, thank you. If you are interested in working on a writer-ready fork of NeoVim, do reach out. :)

[@Shri]

Awesome talk! Absolutely loved the way you use Vim on the phone. Been a developer for more than a decade and a half but never tried using my phone to code! This is amazing! And you even used git to push through your phone. That's just nuts! Haha!

[@Greenindragon]

Such a great talk, and it was super interesting to hear about vim from the perspective of someone who is not knee-deep in programming and software development.

[@nathanberenstein2199]

You have completely inspired me! Vim here we come... I'm gonna try my hand at building a digital typewriter. Thank you for all the useful information!

[@theena]

Good luck!

[@talktothehand1212]

I recommend you take a peek at pandoc. It should be possible to combine multiple markdown chapters into a single docx file with one command. You'll still probably have to manually take care of merging external changes, but at least it can help in one direction.

[@theena]

Thank you, Joe. I will.

[@TravisBHartwell]

I watched this live during the conference, such a great talk! Thanks so much for sharing your story with us.

[@purarue]

Very interesting to see the workflow from a writing perspective. Finally convinced me to go look at telescope

[@KalpeshPanchal]

Thanks Theena for such an amazing talk and sharing all the valuable knowledge with us. You did phenomenal. I wish you the very best for the future endeavors and challenges.

[@rodelias9378]

That was a really good talk. Thanks a lot for that, Theena!! Keep rocking!!

[@cherryramatis2508]

This is just awesome, you’re amazing and as a developer who aspire to be writer it’s just mind blowing and inspirational seeing your workflow Please make more content about your workflow with orgmode and vim, also let’s make the open source book idea a reality

[@j1d7s]

I only now came across this amazing talk. I am a developer and I am not writing a lot of prose and certainly not at that level. It has been so interesting to see the different perspective from a novelist's point of view and the value that Vim and its whole ecosystem can bring to writing. The problems are often the same (finding things fast / not being distracted) but I imagine it is even more important to solve them in a good way in order not to hinder the creative flow.

[@theena]

Thank you for the kind words.

[@thedmnking]

I found this very inspirational. And I too switched to vim during COVID. All the best! As I too use vim to type ( lecture notes in my case ), I found pandoc helpful to convert to other formats.

[@user-df1gs1kf8w]

That is so sick! I have to configure my NeoVim setup right now. Thanks!

[@PalinuroRex]

Loved this video. I also use Vim for scholarship and writing and it’s beautiful to see how people use it for unexpected uses.

[@eritain]

Pre-Vim toolkit and history until 18:50. The important parts are that he found he needed to be able to capture ideas from any device and manage versions.

[@Nephitejnf]

You mention limits that may come up down the road with Vim, but that is what things like Latex and RMarkdown do. Someone else mentioned Pandoc, too. Those items will definitely help you do some of the styling and typesetting right in Vim, and then also convert it all to Word Docs after the fact.

[@theena]

I've taken up Latex and use Pandoc in my workflow now. Can't live with out em, but my point about back and forth while editing with a person from traditional literary editing background still stands. The workflows in these contexts are centered around Word Processors, and specifically features of the newer version of Office 365.

[@Nephitejnf]

@@theena Yeah, very true, not everyone appreciates perfection.

[@Thomas48500]

For me as a hobby writer "vim-outliner" (or "votl") was a blessing. Its a simple hierarchical structured plain text format and vim plugin for outlining. I mark the final text in the document with a colon at the beginning of the lines, that way the final text is visually highlighted. Utilizing vim's folding capabilities you can "zoom" in and out in the granularity of the text/document to see a bigger picture, move parts, etc. It has built-in Checkboxes/TODO lists too.

[@arshadpakkali]

am just astonished by seeing nvim on phone. Love from India ♥️

[@ShivanS]

this is an amazing use case for vim! love the talk. i learnt so much!

[@dulanjala]

wow.... so happy to see another Sri Lankan, talking about anything that's vim/neovim related... As a Software Engineer, I don't know anyone who use vim/neovim as the their editor/IDE in Sri Lanka ... so sad...

[@theena]

Dulanjala, do you want to see how to get a VimConf in LK going?

[@Shri]

That's surprising! What editor do the devs in Sri Lanka typically use?

[@Halesnaxlors]

Great talk! One thing I did when I switched to Vim back in the day was that I switched the keyboard mapping of Caps-Lock and Esc. (I do this in the OS settings) I very rarely use caps lock, and it takes up prime real estate on the keyboard, and as a vim user, I tend to use Esc a lot. Maybe you'd find this helpful :)

[@kasta867]

Thanks for sharing, a really inspirational talk presented in a real clear way!

[@AleksyGrabovski]

Thanks, I never heard about these plugins, but I use vim for 5 years already. Always learning.

[@tokisuno]

seeing prime sans stache feels illegal

[@mhmmdshaz98]

This is so cool seeing someone taking the effort go go out of their comfort zone to learn things that some people consider really confusing and hard. Also, you saying you're not a tech-person is quite ironic because even people in tech is rarely aware of tools like termux (and even vim ).💀.

[@MrG0CE]

THIS GUY IS AWESOME ! LIKE A CHILD DISCOVERING A CANDY STORE, AND EACH DAY DISCOVERING NEW CANDIES ! I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY DON'T APPRECIATE UR WORKFLOW AND U HAVE HAD TO PASS EVERYTHING TO MS WORD... MAN, U NEED TO DISCOVER LATEX !!! AND MAYBE OVERLEAF, THERE'S LATEX IN THERE AS WELL !

[@theena]

Happy to note that I am now on Latex :) And it's fucking incredible.

[@maccsguitar]

I think pandoc + templates could help with taking the text into docx format

[@medicineessentialssimplifi2034]

Thank you very much Mr Theena for wonderful insights for the use of Vim for non- programmers. I would suggest you re: pandoc to convert markdown files to docx.Hope this helps for you to get final manuscript in MS Word.

[@umka7536]

Impressive! Your story is cool and inspirational!

[@vitormelo22]

Thanks to sharing your history. I'm start use vim this year.

[@MrKrtek00]

Great talk. Very good combination of inspiration and also giving technical advice.

[@nicolal.1171]

That was something! Congrats!!!

[@cprn.]

Honestly, I was hoping for some markup that separates the content from styling and would let me write in plain text using something like: said Tom and the renderer that would compile a PDF, HTML or DOCX and depending on styling spit out something like: - "Sure" - said Tom - "why not." or: "Sure", said Tom, "why not". Also, while writing names of characters and places, it's awesome that Vim autocompletes but it'd be even more awesome to be able to list all places or all characters and their properties. At some point I was using a generic names like `commander.name.first` or `commander.places.home-planet` and had files following INI format that included all of those values for each character or place but the `sed` script I used to replace them for rendering the final version had issues. Right now I'm looking into RMarkdown, it however seems like a lot of learning.

[@matercomus]

Luke smith would approve I imagine. NICE SETUP!

[@ranger.1]

you can use pandoc to convert markdown to docx and a lot of other formats as well

[@takeshikovacs1081]

neat workflow!

[@PalinuroRex]

Would love to learn more about how you use Telescope.

[@theena]

Coming soon. Thank you for watching :)

[@oihandeshayes6751]

wow, the primeagen without mustache!

[@theena]

Way too kind, but no. That man is a true VI-zard.

[@mvargasmoran]

Director's Cut quality.

[@theena]

Aww man, you are too kind.

[@HyperFocusMarshmallow]

This looks great.

[@medicineessentialssimplifi2034]

Thank you very much for your talk. I would suggest you to tool called pan doc to convert your vim based text to word

[@sasipraveen5257]

Hello came here from thePrimeagen also a Sri lankan

[@IvanGOrtolan]

Impressive even for a developer

[@user-he4ef9br7z]

I don't know if you already know this but here's a trick that might help you be faster with character names, I used to use it for Literature notes in high school. Execute a command like this... :ab rk Raskolnikov now every time you type 'rk' in insert mode, it will automatically expand to 'Raskolnikov'. This helps with proper nouns, and in my opinion, is way faster than using autocorrect. You may also keep all these abbreviations in different files and source them for different stories.

[@theena]

OMG that just blew my mind. Tried it and worked. This has reminded me to have my own Snippet file to make things even easier. Thank you. PS: The Friedrich painting on your profile picture is among my favourites.

[@kalixzee7505]

Does anyone know what file manager is at 9:50? It looks super cool.

[@theena]

That is Dolphin.

[@glidersuzuki5572]

Wasn't there already fzf plugin for word search?

[@rkdeshdeepak4131]

Caption at 3:08 : my workflow before I had women in my life. Ha Ha

[@Flackon]

What plugin is that panel at 27:08?

[@theena]

Telescope. nvim

[@rkdeshdeepak4131]

Which software did you use to create the presentation and to show it ?

[@theena]

Google slides.

[@jujekebabb]

Wow !

[@leknyzma]

look it's prime :)

[@darccau7204]

Cool

[@mohityadav21]

Noice 👍

[@phyzix_phyzix]

Wait till he discovers emacs :D

[@user-he4ef9br7z]

Too bad the vast majority people in the publishing/writing space aren't as enlightened as you are. I wanted to write for a website and the only format they accepted was docx. Imagine not using markdown for article submissions! They could've done all the formatting automatically instead of having some employee muck around with MS Word.