Do you use Vim for your notes?

Question

I currently use a combination of Vim + the vimoutliner plugin to keep notes. To the vimmers out there, what tips, tricks, habits, tools, etc do you use to keep your collection of valuable nuggets of info organized?

Answer 1

While I exclusively use vim for coding, for regular notes I use Google Docs. I find it's just easier with free-form text to use a more document-oriented editor.

Answer 2

Here's an interesting video about using Vim as a note taking platform (in particular, using the Cornell Note Taking method).

Answer 3

I used to, until someone showed me SlickRun, which comes with SlickJot. Extremely handy, always one keyboard shortcut away. It's not good for permanent notes, but it's great to replace pen-and-paper or whiteboard jottings, and you can always migrate your more permanent notes to another program (Outlook for me).

Answer 4

Well if Jason is going to break with the vimmers - I use emacs with some custom macros and modes.

Answer 5

I write out most of my notes using Vim in LaTeX, then publish to a pdf. I find the professional looking output of the typesetter much easier to read/study and it helps with structuring the text (underlining, bold, bullets, equations, etc.).

Also, it gives a nice set of notes if you happen to share with other students.

Answer 6

I just started using the Vim plugin cwiki. It's a very young project, but looks promising. Here is a screenshot.

VimNotes sounds interesting too, haven't tested it yet though.

Answer 7

I've been using Vim and Viki for the past two years and totally love it.

The ability to do \vt and open a viki link in a new tab is alone worth it.

Answer 8

Here's an interesting syntax highlighter for note-taking in Vim.

Answer 9

I keep my todo list in vim+vimoutliner. I wrote about this at: http://peterstuifzand.nl/gtd-vimoutliner.html.

Answer 10

Sure, I use Vim for my daily diary/journal/thoughts, together with a few standard unix tools. I use a standard naming convention for each day's file, YYMMYY.txt, e.g. 081204.txt . This makes it simple to sort when looking at all my daily notes in the file explorer.

I often start to write tomorrow's journal in the afternoon of the working day, which pre-frames me to work. Usually this is very helpful, sometimes it isn't.

I put everything for the day in this file. I mix my personal thoughts and also my work tasks and work diary such as useful SQL statements etc into this one daily place. I used to maintain separate files for "personal" and "work", but then was finding that this didn't work for me. So now I write my personal thoughts in, and insert 50 blank lines to obfuscate that a little bit, in case I leave my journal open (which often happens).

It's easy to copy *.txt to a thumbdrive or to my mobile phone as a backup or for offline review.

I have standard unix utilities installed on my Vista box, and as I write, I often use

!}fmt

to format my paragraph to 72 columns.

For convenience, I wrote a utility in AutoHotKey which maps a function key to automatically open in vim the journal file for the day constructed like YYMMDD.txt. (This same utility also gives me instant window move/resize using mouse buttons, but that's another story).

I (usually :) write my working hours for each day at the top of this file.

I frequently use "grep -i *.txt" to find something I've previously worked on.

I use to write a file like this just every now and again, but since I started my current job (just over a year ago) I've written one every single day. It's amazing how all the entries all add up, and as a whole forms a big view of what I've been working on, my thinking at the time, and see how I've learnt and changed.