Recently I have been asked to share some of my content on a site called Ops School, a very cool site, that bills itself as “a comprehensive program that will help you learn to be an operations engineer”. It is essentially an online guide covering topics geared towards a successful career in IT. If you haven’t checked the site out already I highly suggest you go take a look! Like right now. Even better if you have something to contribute! Either join the mailing list or get going by joining the community over on github. Contributing to this project is a fantastic way to get your name on an Open Source project and would also be a great learning experience if that type of things is interesting to you. At least it has been for me so far.
Anyway, the project has a set of guidelines and styles posted on their site for authors to adhere by. Thus far I have found Vim to be the best word processor for following these styles and also the best way to submit writing to this project, plus it is a good way to force myself to make use of Vim because I don’t get much practice using it otherwise.
I have taken bits and pieces from various other vimrc’s I’ve found and fit them into my own unique scenario, which I suggest you do as well. But the following section is a great example to use a starting point for adding in the word processor functionality to your vimrc.
func! WordProcessorMode() setlocal formatoptions=t1 setlocal textwidth=80 map j gj map k gk setlocal smartindent setlocal spell spelllang=en_us setlocal noexpandtab endfu com! WP call WordProcessorMode()
One gotcha that I encountered with this setup initially was that lines didn’t automatically re-balance for me if I went back to a previous paragraph and made a change that caused a line to spill over the 80 character word wrap limit. To do align paragraphs, select the text that has come out of line and type “gq” to balance out the text in the paragraph again.
If you have question let me know. Otherwise, if you have any other tricks or tips that you like to use to enhance your Vim word processing experience feel free to let me know!
