tildebrennen/textfiles/vimpoems.txt

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Eric Weir wrote:

> Wondering if there are any poets here who use vim in writing
> poetry, either in the messy creative phase or the later
> refining, polishing, and editing phase. If so, I’d be
> interested in knowing how you use vim, how you find vim
> helpful, and whether there are any plugins that you have found
> especially helpful.

I use vim for most of what I don't write inside a browser, which
includes a lot of poetry and prose.

I'm not sure if I draw much of a distinction between the things
that make a good code editor and the things that make a good
literary text editor.  I can certainly imagine that distinction,
but I think if you like plain text, filter scripts, the
coreutils, renderable markup languages, that sort of thing, then
it all kind of fits together.

I'm slowly writing a book partly about using the GNU/Linux CLI
for literary things:

  https://p1k3.com/userland-book/

...which doesn't (yet, anyway) touch on vim, but it's sort of the
environment I have in mind.

As to the editor specifically, I do a lot of pretty intensive
rewriting, rearranging lines or stanzas, replacing words, and
experimenting with line breaks and spacing.  Vim's pretty good at
quickly slicing and dicing text.

I use this binding a lot for chopping lines up:

  " split lines under the cursor (modeled on, maybe, emacs?)
  map K i<CR><Esc>g;

As far as plugins go, NERD tree makes the whole editor a lot more
useful for working with a collection of files, and I tend to
organize projects as flatfiles in a directory, or blog entries in
a tree of directories named after dates.

Lastly, I have some simple tools for producing markup from a
source format.  So, for example, the last poem I wrote looks like
this in source:

  <h1>monday, january 5</h1>

  <freeverse>
  driving down 36 to see you
  i grasp at the scene around me
  trying to fix in mind for you
  some list or hierarchy
  of attributes and aspects:
  snow on the hills
  snow on the plains
  the moon on the snow
  sundown on the clouds
  the haze over the city lights
  electricity vivid and gleaming
  within the field of some
  greater radiance
  </freeverse>

...where the stuff inside <freeverse> gets translated to regular
HTML with linebreaks in the right places.  It's a small thing,
but it's a lot easier to stay in the flow of writing without
having to worry about markup boilerplate.  For print output in
the past I've switched this up to generate LaTeX directly, but I
think next time I produce something in book form I'll see what I
can get done with Pandoc.

-- bpb