VimWiki – A personal wiki for Vim
vimwiki.github.io
vimwiki.github.io
I've been using this for years, and keep all my notes in a wiki[0], written in GitHub flavour mark down, with syntax highlighting etc. in the editor. I guess it's not orgmode (which sounds amazing), but it seems really really good to me.
I created the vimwiki_markdown[1] gem which allows you to convert GH style markdown to HTML using the wiki. Now I might just call out to pandoc, but I didn't know about it at the time, and my gem works fine*
I love that you can have project specific wikis etc. It's just so great. I'll also link to the relevant section in my .vimrc[2] if you are going to go down the markdown route.
[1] https://github.com/patrickdavey/vimwiki_markdown
[2] https://github.com/patrickdavey/dotfiles/blob/682e72e4b7a70e...
- [ ] For an unchecked item
- [x] For a checked itemSo often when I am taking notes, the notes involve diagrams. Markdown is great at text, but has nothing for diagrams.
After a lot of thinking about this problem, I've decided to start using an iPad with an Apple Pencil and Microsoft OneNote. Here is an example of some notes I took when thinking about an AudioUnit plugin that would dilate time:
https://1drv.ms/o/s!AtbMnk02vU5DgQBbmSeyPx9zd1Dn
VimWiki is definitely very cool. Just sharing this in case anyone out there has the same concern as me about drawing diagrams.
That said, I rarely draw pictures and defer diagraming to my co workers, so vimwiki will fill a purpose for me.
https://monodraw.helftone.com/
It was a ruby rogues pick a while back, you might like it!
I use it with taskwiki [1] extension, which stores all the tasks in the awesome Taskwarrior [2] CLI task manager. With this, I have my tasks in my text files, searchable just a command away on the CLI or my mobile phone via the Android app.
[1] https://taskwarrior.org/ [2] https://github.com/tbabej/taskwiki
Being able to easily edit on the phone (iOS) side is what has kept me on something like Wunderlist. I prefer text files on my laptop and home machine, but it's not as easy to edit them on iOS.
* https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kvj.taskw
* https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taskwc2
Syncing happens via taskd server daemon [1], if you don't want to self host, kind people run public syncing servers:
* https://inthe.am/ (also provides web interface)
I like the idea of just being able to add todo items quickly from a shell without opening the task list but I imagine those items would not be reflected in my taskwiki list without some kind of taskwarrior hook.
Say you have all your work tasks tagged with 'work'. Then your taskwiki file might look like this
This file contains all the work-relevant information.
=== My work tasks | +work ==
* [ ] Implement feature X
If you subsequently do: $ task add +work Test feature X
The next time you open the taskwiki file, it will look like this(syncing happens when you open the file):
This file contains all the work-relevant information.
=== My work tasks | +work ==
* [ ] Implement feature X
* [ ] Test feature X
Many thanks for the above information and the initial recommendation. This setup seems to be exactly what I've been looking for for quite some time.
It says...
organize notes and ideas
manage todo-lists
write documentation
write a diary
Projects like this really deserve some high-level explanation like "Do you want to do X, but don't like having to do Y? This addresses that."
It also allows quick access to it and some form of file management (eg. When renaming a file)
I think it is also able to export to a real wiki platform.
I "link" them by path ( with gf you go to the file under path ), and every change is commited using https://github.com/nevik/gitwatch
I use grep ( or git grep ) for searching in my notes.
Todo Lists: Hitting C-Space marks the item as done or not done. It also creates a progress indicator on parent TODO items.
- [.] Do something
- [X] Something 1
- [ ] Something 2
- [ ] Something 3
Tables are auto-formatted to match the text you put into them.
All of this is entirely possible with plain text files, vimwiki just makes it easier to do. It's even compatible with markdown formatted files.
Does it have its own build/rendering engine, or can I use one I already know (Pandoc)?
And frankly, I simply consider it to be a wiki. I rarely if ever find the need to export it out. Makes for a great personal wiki if you're already in Vim.
let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/Dropbox/Public/briefcase/vimwiki'}]
Thanks for adding markdown support. :)
Is there a way in which I can show my gratitude? I can donate money or contribute code (if you need help).
Great work, please keep up the awesomeness!
When I started, VimWiki syntax was better supported than markdown. I've seen lots of markdown related pull requests come through, so maybe that's changed.
I use VimWiki for:
* Life goals (stretch and short term). I use it almost as a centering tool.
* Poetry
* Passages from books
* Book summaries (that I write)
* Lecture/Speech notes
* Notes on misc. items I want to explore
* Ideas for future science fiction short stories
https://github.com/tbabej/knowledge
Beware, highly experimental, and the documentation is lacking (reading the tests would be the best idea to get a feeling how the syntax works).
And I believe that all of that is probably less than 50% of the whole of org mode. I will learn more as and when I feel the need. If you feel lost, read the org mode manual or ask the org mode mailing list.
I really want to learn either Vim or Emacs but I've never been able to decide which one to learn. Every time I've tried to search about this topic I end up in petty wars. Help?
Then, if your friends use emacs, use evil-mode because vim is the best.
(Disclaimer: I am a happy Spacemacs user, and it would take a lot to pry it away from me.)
I'd recommend learning vi, so you can learn how awesome modal editing is. Then, learn Emacs' basic commands for line editing (so as to make readline apps easier to work with). Once you've done that, evaluate whether a (Neo)vim with plugins or Spacemacs setup is better for you, then choose one of those.
- *-mode (specific syntax highlighting, commands, etc. based on project or task)
- edit/save remote files via built-in TRAMP [0]
- built-in plugin manager (interactive, or via emacs init config)
- MELPA [1]
- Non-blocking (e.g., run tests in one buffer while editing source in another)
- client-server approach (neovim adopted this, but emacs has had far more time to work out the kinks)
The main reasons I stay with vim are:
- already committed to vi-like muscle memory (and evil-mode, while admirable, doesn't cut it)
- no translation of VimL configs and plugins to Emacs Lisp
- many plugins for languages, frameworks, etc. which I use daily are severely out of date in emacs (and I'm too lazy to maintain them myself)
[0]: http://askubuntu.com/questions/79100/how-to-open-a-remote-fi...
[1]: http://melpa.org/
Do you use neovim?
Use vim, learn vim all the way. If/when you're working on an "old" vi (e.g. the one in busybox, for embedded developers), you'll need to drop some of the more advanced stuff, but you'll still be able to do what you want, edit some config file or such, though it may feel a bit awkward at times. But when you're doing the heavy editing, you really want to use all of vim.
Your advice is very misleading in 2016.
I don't think there is an active vi codebase, vi is actually vim in compatibility mode in most operating systems.
The main one is the concept of composability [0] - in vim, you're speaking a mini-language. You have commands (delete, copy, make uppercase,...), and a number of movements (right, down, to the next occurrence of a word, to line 27,...) or objects (word, line, paragraph, html tag, text within quotes, ...) to work on. These can be combined in any way you like, any command can be applied to any movement or object. So if you have a plugin like vim-angry that adds a "C-style function parameter" text object, all the commands you know can be applied to that. In contrast, in emacs, you have a number of commands (kill-line, kill-word, ...), and that's it. You have to get by with those. If they didn't implement the command you'd like to use, tough luck.
A second (minor) reason for me is that I work in the embedded software world, and usually on an embedded linux, there's at least some variant of vim or vi available, while emacs is very rare.
Take my advice with a grain of salt : I've never really used emacs, so I can't compare from first hand. From what I've heard, emacs is also a very good editor. To me, the question "should I use vim or emacs" is more or less the same as "should I use firefox or chrome" - I'm a chrome guy myself, but I don't consider firefox to be crap, nor its users to be idiots. Internet explorer on the other hand,...
So my advice : learn vim. And if you don't, learn emacs. Just learn to use either one properly, and you'll be way faster at editing than people who don't use those.
[0] a.o. https://medium.com/@mkozlows/why-atom-cant-replace-vim-43385...
So you just need to implement a bunch of selection commands to get Vim-style composability. I think lots of these modern text editors like sublime or atom come with select word, select parenthesized expression, select paragraph, etc. If the editor is extensible you can define new selection commands and compose them with the existing commands that operate on a region, just like Vim. Emacs certainly has a bunch of marking commands.
The extra commands you mentioned in Emacs (kill-word, kill-line, etc.) are just for convenience: Shortcuts for common cases. In Vim you can delete to the end of the word with dw. In Emacs you could also do a 2 keystroke solution: do mark-word, delete-region (you could use backspace, Control D or delete for that second second thing since they "operate on the region of the selection is active", so C-@ <backspace> would do it). Unlike Vim you also have the option of a single chord with the convenience command kill-word.
Why Atom can't replace Vim: https://medium.com/@mkozlows/why-atom-cant-replace-vim-43385...
I don't think the link you have addresses my point at all.
That you can build up sophisticated actions just by knowing the primitives and text objects is the point, right? And not having to memorize different commands and different selections.
From the article:
But now let’s look at delete commands. Let’s say you want to delete a word, delete to the end of the line, delete to the end of the file, or delete to the end of a paragraph. Emacs only has two of these functions: kill-word and kill-line. Atom has the same two, more or less: deleteToEndOfWord() and deleteLine().
Vim, though, is different. Vim only has one command: d, which is “delete.” What does it delete? You name it, literally. The d command gets combined together with those commands for movement: dw deletes to the next word, d$ to the end of the line, dG to the end of the file, and d} to the end of the paragraph.
This is where Vim’s composability leads to its power. Emacs and Atom don’t have commands for deleting to the end of a file or a paragraph — even when they have commands to move to those places. But in Vim, if you can move to a location, you can delete to that location.
And composability is about more than just power, it’s also about learnability and consistency. The command for copying text in Vim is y. Do you know how to copy to the end of the line/file/paragraph? Of course you do: It’s y$, yG, and y} respectively. The command for increasing the indent is >, so you instantly know >$, >G, and >}. Convert to lowercase is gu, so… sure enough: gu$, guG, gu}.
Vim normal mode grammar: command motion-or-textobject
Other editor's grammar: select-a-region command
(Also, Vim visual mode grammar: select-a-region command)
Emacs has lots of command that can select a region. They tend to be called mark-something. There are commands for selecting words, sentences, paragraphs, function definitions, S-expressions (the name comes from Lisp but they're defined to be something useful in every language, usually something like "any delimited construct in the language --strings, blocks, array literals, etc."). Once you select something you can apply many actions to it: you can delete it, uppercase it, rot13 it, sort the lines in it, wrap it in parenthesis, etc.
Maybe what tripped the author up is that additionally Emacs has other commands like kill-word, kill-line that are shortcuts for common combinations of a motion and a command. The author is correct in saying that these convenience commands are not composable, but they're nice shortcuts to have (and by the way, contrary to what the author says Emacs does have a kill-paragraph command).
So you to delete a word you can do:
Vim: dw
Emacs composable style: M-@ C-D (that is, mark-word delete- region[^1])
Emacs shortcut: M-D (kill-word)
Atom composable style: Option-Shift-f backspace
Atom shortcut: Option-d
(I got the Atom ones by Googling, I don't if they are right, but if they're not, I'm pretty sure correct ones exist: Atom has both a composable way and a shortcut.)
Vim propaganda should stop saying other editors lack composable commands. Even notepad.exe lets me use any of its paltry motion commands[^2] available to select something and then use a generic delete command to delete whatever I selected. "Composability" is the default mode of operation of most text editors.
Vim propaganda should focus instead on the very real advantages than Vim's command model has. For example:
- dot repeats the whole command/motion pair. This is fabulous!
- Vim has counts so you can delete 9 words just as easily as 3 words. (Emacs also has them, but lots of editors don't, and they're superhandy.)
- Vim has lots of little variations of the motions and textobjects so you can pick exactly what you need, other editors tend to have fewer. For example, for words, Vim has w, e, aw, iw (and probably others I'm forgetting) which are related but a little bit different.
(Also, personally I think Vim bloggers should recognize that those non-composable commands like kill-word are nice optional shortcuts, that are actually a tiny advantage other editors have over Vim. Try playing VimGolf in Emacs --using the nice vimgolf Emacs package, because of course Emacs has a package for that-- and you'll see what I mean.)
----
[^1] OK, techinically C-D is delete-forward-char in the default keybindings, but when a region is active it acts as delete-region.
[^2] It's limited to character, word and line, I think. But people forget even the lowly notepad.exe has word motions (all text widgets on Windows do).
In vim, the most common way to delete a word is also the composable way, and also the shortest (just two keys). In emacs, most people probably learn the shortcuts first, so they don't have the muscle memory for the composable style. The composable style is also two modifier keys longer. So in emacs, first you learn it the "regular" way, with all the shortcuts, and then when you want to learn composability, you have to relearn all sorts of basic things, and spend more keystrokes, to have that. In vim, you've learned some basic commands (dw, c$, yia, ...), and then I tell you about composability, and you understand how you can combine all those commands and movements you already know :-)
I wish Emacs in particular took composability a little more seriously. Probably combining selecting an acting into a single repeatable command by default would be too un-Emacsy (after all, macros are very lightweight and there is evil mode), but it would be great to have all the fine-grained selection commands that Vim has. For example, AucTeX has a command to mark a LaTeX environment, but it also should have what Vim would call "inner LaTeX environment". As a more basic example, I wrote my own mark-line command because what I want to do with lines isn't always kill them! With builtins I think the best way to mark 5 whole lines starting from the one you're one is C-a C-SPC C-5 C-n, which is awful. With a mark-line command you just do M-5 M-L (depending of course on what you bind it too).
There have been attempts to bring better composability to Emacs besides Vi(m) emulators, in particular in a non-modal way. But the ones I've tried haven't fully convinced me. It's definitely possible to do it, but doing it properly might be a major undertaking. Maybe I should just start using evil again.
But the "select text and then apply command", as I understand it, still has a major drawback compared to vim's way of working : the dot-command. In vim, you go "daa" (delete an argument - i.e. delete the argument, including the comma which separates it, if you have the vim-angry plugin). Then you move to another argument, you just press dot, and the same thing happens.
Also, does the selection thing accept counts?
1. Yes, the ability to repeat with dot is advantage of the Vim model. Emacs just repeats the command part not the marking part too, not as useful as dot in Vim!
2. In Emacs every command accepts counts, just like Vim. Textadept doesn't offer counts, I believe. I think counts are probably an advantage of Vim and Emacs over most(?) other editors.
3. About Vim having more motions & text objects: Probably, but Emacs is close. Without extra packages you have: words, symbols and S-expressions (the names come from Lisp but these do something sensible in most languages: Symbol is usually identifier and S-expression is something like delimited expression: A string, a parenthesized expression, a block in curly braces or brackets, etc.), lines, sentences, and paragraphs. Texts packages add other targets like LaTeX environment. One thing definitely lacking in Emacs is that Vim usually offers two variants that differ slightly at the ends (like w vs e, or i( vs a(), those minor variations are pretty useful.
My point is just the saying other editors don't have the ability to combine commands with different things to operate on is obviously false, and claiming is unlikely to convert anytime to Vim. Instead Vim bloggers should focus on how Vim makes the basic composability idea even better with things like counts, repeatability of composed commands, and richer set of selection commands.
I then discovered kakoune[1] and liked its design. I started getting familiar with it and using it more and more, and I think its core is much more solid than vim/emacs. It definitely doesn't have the same community support and plugins but it's already quite feature rich.
I'd still use vim-wiki because it's intended to be a lightweight knowledge database similar to a mind-map, but more robust. It allows for quick, easy organization of ideas whereas vim-notes appears to be more for a formal writing process.
I tried vimwiki with the files stored in Dropbox but it didn't go anywhere. I liked the simplicity of just bunging stuff in a semi-structured .md file.
I worked with Markdown files in Dropbox for several years. However in the last year or two, I sometimes have occaison to read/write notes from my phone or tablet and Sublime Text is not available for those systems. I tried various Android editors like Markdawn and DroidEdit but nothing I was satisfied with.
These days I am slowly gravitating to Google Keep. It's simple but OK for my needs and I can use it cross-device - on desktop these is even a Chrome app which works like a desktop app.
I've made some changes like make the left gutter grey have grey background (so I know where it starts and ends) and some other changes for the way I like to see html, php, js and css. I might have broken the syntax for other languages.
https://github.com/inod/contraste/blob/master/Contraste.tmTh...
three markup syntaxes supported: Vimwiki's own syntax, Markdown, MediaWiki
LiveComment is Editor/IDE-independent, cross-language, realtime & easy with client or server JavaScript plugins.
For example, my HN notes pool http://acpul.org/pool
What are people using for their wiki on iOS? Right now I'm syncing with iA Writer. It works pretty well, but doesn't support links. It looks like Bear is promising -- it uses the same style links, but it doesn't sync with a folder of text files. Any others out there?
I use https://daedalusapp.com/ which i can webdav remotely and rsync locally with vimwiki
{{file:../../images/image.png}}
{{http://example.com/image.png}}
;; There probably are better solutions already
;; available somewhere.
(defun org-insert-screenshot (filename)
(interactive "sFilename: ")
(let ((filename (concat filename ".png")))
;; import is from ImageMagick, change to whatever you like to use
(call-process "import" nil nil nil filename)
(insert (format "[[file:%s]]" filename))
(org-display-inline-images)))I'd like to see if it would be easy to support ReST beside markdown. I'd like to reuse my current files instead of trying to convert them haphazardly...
As morantron says in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13158062
you can navigate from within your existing markupdown* files in Vim by putting the cursor on the filename in your .md/.rst file, type gf, and Vim opens the target file.
I wanted to be able to use the links that I was going to write anyway in my .rst files, but they end in .html and when in vim you probably want to go to a .rst source file.
So you write them ending in .rst, and the makefile fixes that up before giving the file to rst2html. Proper nav within Vim and on the generated .html page.
Would work equally well with any capable programmer's editor that allows you to "go to the file under the cursor."
a) writing a syntax highlighting script for your notes files,
b) using tags to jump to documents and
c) using netrw for browsing your files?
Maybe in 10 years?
But you have to start somewhere.
> Maybe in 10 years?
Org mode has a 5 year advantage over vimwiki (2003 vs 2008) and significantly more contributors. Vimwiki only seems to have had meaningful contributions from others since Q3 2014 So maybe. Who knows.
It also assumes that the average vim developer has roughly the same skill as the average emacs developer. Is that true, though? Obviously I'm biased, but it seems to me that emacs is far friendlier to the sort of user who demands the ability to extend his environment as he wishes.
Which leads me to the question of whether as many vim users are also vim developers, as emacs users are also emacs developers? I think that the former is fairly uncommon, whilst the latter is fairly common. Sure, there are emacs users who don't extend it, but my perception is that they are far rarer than vim users who just use their editor.
Does vim have an equivalent to gnus, magit, eww, erc, emms, slack-mode, info &c.? Probably a few of those, but of the ones it has are they as mature?
[1] e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26669280/setup-a-personal...
There you go. Very little Elisp required, and maybe a little bit more if you want styles. But if you don't have the constraint of being able to browse file:// style, you can link absolutely, so you just need a template, which is doable.
Or you can use the Jekyll plugin, if you want to go that way.