On 04/07/2011 06:13 PM, Eric Weir wrote: > Hope to find some free time in the next few days just to mess > around with it -- actually, to do the tutorial -- and maybe get > over the initial hump of total bafflement.
Based on your participation on this list, looks like you've got plenty of free time to learn Vim. :) Vim is an awesome tool for authors. By "authors" I mean, for instance, authors of published works, like ebooks, paper books, and magazines published and sold at bookstores. But I consider programmers authors too. Code makes computers do things, but that's almost a side effect. The most important purpose of code is communicating with other programmers (including your future self). Vim helps authors focus on content! +1 to the many suggestions for using Vim to edit plain text or markup, then sending the text off to another tool for processing. One markup I like is AsciiDoc ( http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/). AsciiDoc uses a simple markup which can be processed in different ways depending on the desired result. You can make Web pages, beautiful ebooks, and professional-looking papers from the same (or very similar) source text. You can send off the plain text to publishers since they'll probably want to do their own layout anyway. AsciiDoc is easier to learn than LaTeX. Markups are generally easy to learn. If you're spending lots of time with the formatting and layout commands of a particular markup, you probably want something else that supports more absolute or visual layouts (like Inkscape or LibreOffice). I always prefer markup for the same reason I like Vim: it helps me focus on content over everything else. Do you play a musical instrument? Think of vimtutor like learning a very easy song on the piano. The first time you sit down, it takes a few hours to even hit the right notes. After sleeping on it for a night, maybe you can play all the notes, and maybe even on tempo. By the third day, you could even teach someone else the song. Once Vim gets into your muscle memory, productivity skyrockets. This also makes me think that there's a book or lecture waiting to be written: "Vim for Non-Programmers" or "Vim for Authors". Hmm, searching google for "vim for writers" does reveal a few hits along these lines: * http://therandymon.com/woodnotes/vim-for-writers/vimforwriters.html * http://therandymon.com/content/view/189/98/ * http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/56506 -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
