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+On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Eric Weir <eeweir@bellsouth.net> wrote:
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+> Wondering if there are any poets here who use vim in writing
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+> poetry, either in the messy creative phase or the later
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+> refining, polishing, and editing phase. If so, I’d be
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+> interested in knowing how you use vim, how you find vim
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+> helpful, and whether there are any plugins that you have found
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+> especially helpful.
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+I use vim for most of what I don't write inside a browser, which
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+includes a lot of poetry and prose.
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+
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+I'm not sure if I draw much of a distinction between the things
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+that make a good code editor and the things that make a good
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+literary text editor. I can certainly imagine that distinction,
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+but I think if you like plain text, filter scripts, the
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+coreutils, renderable markup languages, that sort of thing, then
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+it all kind of fits together.
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+I'm slowly writing a book partly about using the GNU/Linux CLI
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+for literary things:
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+
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+ https://p1k3.com/userland-book/
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+
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+...which doesn't (yet, anyway) touch on vim, but it's sort of the
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+environment I have in mind.
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+
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+As to the editor specifically, I do a lot of pretty intensive
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+rewriting, rearranging lines or stanzas, replacing words, and
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+experimenting with line breaks and spacing. Vim's pretty good at
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+quickly slicing and dicing text.
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+
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+I use this binding a lot for chopping lines up:
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+
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+ " split lines under the cursor (modeled on, maybe, emacs?)
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+ map K i<CR><Esc>g;
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+
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+As far as plugins go, NERD tree makes the whole editor a lot more
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+useful for working with a collection of files, and I tend to
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+organize projects as flatfiles in a directory, or blog entries in
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+a tree of directories named after dates.
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+
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+Lastly, I have some simple tools for producing markup from a
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+source format. So, for example, the last poem I wrote looks like
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+this in source:
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+
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+ <h1>monday, january 5</h1>
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+
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+ <freeverse>
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+ driving down 36 to see you
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+ i grasp at the scene around me
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+ trying to fix in mind for you
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+ some list or hierarchy
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+ of attributes and aspects:
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+ snow on the hills
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+ snow on the plains
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+ the moon on the snow
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+ sundown on the clouds
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+ the haze over the city lights
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+ electricity vivid and gleaming
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+ within the field of some
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+ greater radiance
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+ </freeverse>
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+
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+...where the stuff inside <freeverse> gets translated to regular
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+HTML with linebreaks in the right places. It's a small thing,
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+but it's a lot easier to stay in the flow of writing without
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+having to worry about markup boilerplate. For print output in
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+the past I've switched this up to generate LaTeX directly, but I
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+think next time I produce something in book form I'll see what I
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+can get done with Pandoc.
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+
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+-- bpb
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