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73 lines
2.5 KiB
73 lines
2.5 KiB
On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Eric Weir 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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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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https://p1k3.com/userland-book/
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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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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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I use this binding a lot for chopping lines up:
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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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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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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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<h1>monday, january 5</h1>
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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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...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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-- bpb
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