Re: Vim et al.

[russurquhart1@xxxxxxxx]

 Myron

Would strongly urge you to look as ASCII markup systems like Markdown. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown) and then also look at a utility called Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/). Using Markdown or Pandocs Markdown syntax, you can create a document, in a Xywrite or Vim, containing footnotes, endnotes, tables, headings, etc. Then, using Pandoc, take your Markdown file and convert that TO & FROM Word docx, Latex, RTF, DocBook, Html, etc.

The Markdown markup is easily readable, maintainable, etc and can be used to source, via Pandoc,
to/from just about ANY major file format. Please take a look at this!

Rafe,

Glad to hear your having success with Vim. I encourage you, as i was, to try and work with Vim's
existing keybindings, and how it works, there is a methodology to the seeming madness, and you can
end up becoming quite fast and proficient!

Good luck!

Russ




On 12/08/14, Myron Gochnauer wrote:

I’ve 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. We’ve 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. I’ve
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
>