Ask YC: Do you write essays in VIM?

2 pointsmk4 comments

I primarily use VIM as my editor of choice, and am quite comfortable editing code in it. What I almost never use it for is writing long essays. Sometimes I will put some quick notes down, but almost always switch to something like neo office to finish it up. So my question is, if you use it, what kind of setup makes things easier for long essay writing?

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LaTeX is the way to go.

As Brad, is unlikely to pimp it, I will instead. Check out his creation MonkeyTex (http://monkeytex.com).

Makes LaTeX document creation (and collaboration) easy.

No, I use emacs.

I used a lot of LaTeX in XEmacs in grad school. Now I've really taken to LyX for shorter documents. This is really not the kind of thing you move into *Office to pretty up afterwards, though. Once you make your PS or PDF, that's supposed to be it, but that's how I like it.

If you want to do really long essays (greater than 15 pages, say), I really recommend something based on parsing a markup language (TeX/LaTeX/troff/lout) because they're then easier to compartmentalize into multiple files and the numbering of sections and figures is automatic.

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