> Having recently rather unexpectedly found myself back on this list
> after being unable to get on it for several years,
There have been reports on the list of individuals who had unsbscribed
from vim@vim.org years ago and all of a sudden started receiving mail
again from the new vim_use@googlegoups.com. I'd say this was some time
over the last few months, so you could search the archives and see if
anything conclusive came of it.
> I seem to see a difference in emphasis. Most people who post here
> appear to be programmers, whereas previously there were other kinds of
> users as well. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and I'm not trying
> to start a flame war. But I'm not a programmer yet I use vim for all
> my writing and I'm wondering if I'm unusual.
Insofar as you are using GNU/linux, you are already 'unusual'. Being a
writer rather than a programmer and resorting to Vim as your tool of
choice, probably makes you even more so by a few orders of magnitude.
But then, and this list is an example thereof, even programmers do
indulge in other activities besides programming.
And one could even argue that the minute you start using a computer you
become a programmer anyway.
> I write books among other things, and for that I first compose the
> text in vim, which allows me to concentrate on the meaning without
> bothering about the appearance, and then transfer it to LyX for final
> formatting. I find it useful to have these two different phases in
> writing. What I like about vim is the possibility to make quick
> transpositions of blocks of text and other changes. I usually end up
> with several files containing different versions of what I've written.
You could take at look a the 'latex-suite' plugin. If you are on debian,
do the following for a quick evaluation:
# vim-addons -w install latex-suite # as root / system-wide install
$ vim
:h latex-suite-quickstart.txt
:h latex-suite
Or you could investigate whether LyX can be customized to emulate the
behavior of Vim's interface in terms of keyboard actions.
> Searching the web for people's views on writing methods I found a
> number who said that one should use vim for programming but Emacs for
> other kinds of writing. So I had a look at Emacs out of curiosity but
> couldn't see any real advantage for me in learning it. Am I missing
> something here?
It takes time to become comfortable enough with either Vim or Emacs to
be able to push them out of the way and focus on the writing.
I enjoy using Vim for writing English text, because I neither have to
take my eyes off the display nor have to take my fingers off the
keyboard's home row: aside from 'Ctrl-[' to switch between insert/normal
mode, which I favor over reaching for my laptop's tiny out-of-reach
escape key, I find that pretty much all the keyboard 'meta-actions' that
I need to frequently perform besides the ones that let me enter text,
save energy (usually one key-press or two after escaping out of insert
mode rather than hard-to-sync modifier+key combos), and also do not
require the hand flexibility and of eye quickness of a 4-year old (none
of that looking down at the keyboard to reach for arrow keys, <PgUp>,
<PdDown>, <Home>, <End>, etc.
In other words, unless you have reached the nirvana of perfect typing
accuracy, and you never need to amend your output, Vim is to my mind
best of breed in terms of efficient general-purpose editing.
I am not God's scribe after all.
Note, that I forced myself to learn to type a few years ago and have
become proficient enough to come close to my initial goal, which was to
be able to enter text at the keyboard as naturally and effortlessly as
I was able to write with a pen. And yes, it turned out that integrating
the minimal set of Vim's most frequently used commands to my muscle
memory was an important part of the equation. It may skew my vision of
the issue but unfortunately, apart from the frustration, I cannot
remember anything from the days when I could not type.
> Is anyone else still using vim for writing lengthy texts?
I can't say I totally agree with Marc who feels such general questions
do not make sense, because maybe the implicit question here was whether
here in this forum lurk individuals with expertise using Vim to write
lengthy texts, and if so what features does Vim provide that makes life
easier for them. Since I cannot peek over their hypothetical shoulders,
I would be curious as well. The list is called vim_use, for one thing,
and for another, this is the type of question where RTFM does not
provide the answer.
CJ
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