Vim et al.

[Myron Gochnauer goch@xxxxxxxx]

Ive run across many text editors that are amazingly flexible - - Winedt and TextMate are my favourites - - but unless I use a markup language - - LaTeX is wonderful though finicky - - they isolate me too severely from word-processing.

I can barely write a letter without using hanging indents, and anything destined for an academic
setting (law school in my case) cannot exist without an easily maintained cushion of footnotes
and/or endnotes. Weve had a lengthy discussion on the list about getting to and from MS Word, and
unfortunately that need is not more readily met by using Vim, TextMate, Emacs or any other text
editor I know of.

What we, or at least *I*, need is a way to customize conversion between Word and all kinds of ASCII
editors, including XyWrite. Going to and from WordStar in olden days was pretty easy, since like
XyWrite it was pretty much formatted by in-line codes. Ive never gotten my head around the Word
method of embedding formatting commands, and as plain text RTF looks terribly busy.

Myron


> On Dec 7, 2014, at 5:37 PM, Raphael  wrote:
>
>
> Just recently moved to Vim (a nod to Russ U. for the nudge) where I am happy as I've ever been with Xy. Essentially it's the same idea -- plain-text writing and editing, which really is no longer exotic or arcane, since it's how programmers work. Took some adjusting to get used to a few of the keystrokes -- it's still hard for me not to start marking text with F1, I may have to figure out how to remap that -- but after a day or two I was perfectly comfortable, not much different than switching to saxophone from clarinet. Simple integration with the system keyboard plus lots of other Linuxy things (free-as-in-beer-as-well-as-speech certainly among them), thousands if not millions of plug-ins (thanks to a burgeoning and industrious Vim cult), potential for extreme customization, powerful search/replace. And a cool name.
>
> It's been vicariously exciting to see Xy users liberated the last few months, but I've moved on. Like all of us, I owe a debt of gratitude to Carl (and RJH, and everyone here) whose work in XPL still fills me with awe -- their labor, and this community, largely made it possible for me to use Xy for thirty years. A tip of the cap to y'all for all the wisdom & entertainment.
>
> -rafe
>