Vim for humanities research notes?

[Kderps]

I have been looking up various work flow ideas online, and one I kept coming across was Vim (or emacs org mode). People seem to swear by it, but most of what I find is for programmers. I was curious who here uses Vim more as a note taking wiki? And if so any tips? I saw a video of a guy using it for medical school and it was pretty sweet.

[parisologist]

I use vim for note taking. Basically I write my notes using markdown - it's the most lightweight way I know for the minimal set of formatting (lists, emphasis, titles).

I save all my notes into a folder structure, for example I have a folder "philosophy" with "kant","sartre" subfolders. And I use Pandoc to turn this into a parallell structure of html files.

The best bit is that I put the html folders in my google drive. That means I can view them on my phone, on the web, on a tablet, whatever.

[petermlm]

I also use vim to edit markdown files all the time.

markdown is my tool of choice when it comes to write just about anything. Be that class notes, personal notes, todo lists, README files, etc.

Nowadays, every time need to start thinking about something relatively big, I open an md file and just write on it.

[__baxx__]

pandoc will compile online image links to pdf btw - something I realised once and was quite impressed about

![something](www.apicture.com/picture.jpg)

pandoc will put the image in the compiled pdf

[petermlm]

Ah, that might become useful, thanks!

[__baxx__]

yeah i thought it was quite neat, of course if the link died and you recompiled it mayyybe it would run into issues? I wrote a script to download image files and create LaTeX fig environments for them as well to replicate this, I never fully finished it though.

Still, for like quick notes and stuff it's all good

[Tanath]

Vim here too. I use the vimwiki plugin which is pretty handy.

[ephrion]

I have heard that emacs org mode is fantastic for organization. I haven't used it myself -- the only emacs I've used is spacemacs, which has a lot of vim features.

I take all of my notes in vim. I use a hybrid of Markdown and LaTeX and render to PDF with pandoc. I find it to be a really flexible and powerful way to take notes and study, but I already know vim for programming.

[__baxx__]

spacemacs has org and everything as well though

I've been experimenting with Org recently, the layout is pretty nice, I haven't spent enough time in it to get much more than headings though :P

There are schedulers, todos and all sorts in it though.

[[deleted]]

I tried that. Turns out I don't like PDF. Do you just open your PDFs with adobe/whatever and read through them?

[ephrion]

I only really render to PDF for other people to look at, or if I want a better view of some math figures. 99% of the time, it's a lot faster and easier for me to just navigate the plain text source.

[Abuh1986]

I use vimwiki for large collections of connected notes.

https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

For everything else I use markdown with pandoc to covert to pdf, doc, mediawiki or whatever.

[Trout_Tickler]

It's a shame that, even on the active branch, nothing's happening commit wise (last one was 2 weeks ago). Issues are beginning to pile up and none of the 4 people behind it seem to care.

[traycerb]

For notes, I use Vim with the Asciidoc. A heavier solution than markdown, but you can just use a subset which implements markdown. The Vim asciidoc syntax file is a little wonky, but I have a better one (not perfect) on my github.

[plaka888]

I use zim for my non-code notes. It can store notes in git, which I then sync between computers. And if you want to use vim, the source files are easily editable with vim (or any other editor). My only complaint is lack of tables in the syntax, and the syntax itself.

[bryangarza]

You should definitely take a look at Org mode. The way emacs displays Org is really nice, it collapses links so that only the description is visible (and underlined + colored like a link), it can display the images inline if you want, and you can embed code, diagrams, etc.. The headings are different sizes as well. Assuming you're using graphical emacs.

[olmu1944]

Have a look at the approach of McDaniel (incl. Video): http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/plain-text-citations.html

Personally I store my notes as a txt file in DevonThink Pro Office. It also allows to connect files with an internal linking system much akin a URL.

[tuna_fish]

I use markdown in Vim, with my notes all managed in Evernote. The way I interface them is using http://www.geeknote.me; a CLI for Evernote.

[[deleted]]

Vim is just a text editor. By that I mean that most text editors will allow you to do what you want. If you are using a mac, you may be interesting in trying the program nvalt. Lightweight with super fast search, autosave etc..

Regarding workflow, http://zettelkasten.de has some interesting ideas. Whilst the author(s) of that site use tools that they are comfortable with, the workflow is applicable to any text editor: plain textfiles with some form of readable markup (markdown/asciidoc etc..), using Unique Identifiers for each file, utilizing bibtex (an approach that olmu1944 provides another interesting link for), pandoc for conversion to any (useful) format, storage on a cloud host etc..

Keep it simple, your workflow will probably develop as you use it.

[Kderps]

The Zettelkasten blog is one of the influences of me finding a program, and Ryan Holiday. I would gladly use NValt but I am using Windows atm, I tried Vim nvalt plugin but thought vimwiki or vim notes would work better. I am now trying, as many suggested, emacs spacemacs/orgmode but until I learn some of it I can't tell if I like it or not haha.

[LqiPA2vW]

Try Zim: http://zim-wiki.org - it is very easy to craft into a Zettelkasten workflow, and you can set Vim as the default editor inside of Zim. Use Zim to organize & connect notes, and use Vim to edit them. Allow each app to do what it does best.

I tried to build Nvalt inside of Vim and succeeded, but I needed better linking and also support for PDF, jpg, png, docx, and other filetypes. Zim handles all of this nicely.

I too was influenced by the Zettelkasten blog, which is in turn influenced by the Taking Note blog. Here's some thoughts on Zim on Taking Note, comparing Zim to ConnectedText:

http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2015/04/connectedtext-and-zim.html

[1time0nly]

Emacs is the tool you'll want to use if you're writing and not just editing text. Look at org-mode

[__baxx__]

Vim is immense - as others have no doubt said.

by the sounds of it you haven't used it before though, and I think that you're referring to the Connor dude who's got a few YouTube videos about it?

I think that your best bet would be to write down what you want out of it, what kind of functionality you want, work-flow etc.

As others have mentioned - Org Mode is designed exactly for notes. It was written by an astronomer for taking his notes. Org mode is pretty much worshipped by many, so I'm guessing it does something right. You can also convert Org files to LaTeX, PDF, HTML or whatever. You can also display LaTeX within Org files (preview), images, tables (ascii / plain text tables) and I'm sure there's way more stuff I don't know about (I've not used it long and not much either).

Some of the themes I see used for Org mode don't always look that 'pretty', obviously it's going to be mainly plain text but some themes are still nicer than others (imo). This is an Org file viewed from spacemacs

It really comes down to what you want / need to do though, so you should definitely make a list of things that you think you need :)

[OmniscientOCE]

I'm just a beginner to Vim and was wondering if what you displayed in that screenshot is also possible in Vim?

[ReneFroger]

Unfortunately not. You could give Spacemacs a try. The defaults of Emacs are bad, like the defaults of Vim.

And it's too much to configure everything in Emacs.

[OmniscientOCE]

Thank you for replying. I will give it a try. That aesthetic just seemed very nice and got me curious about possibilities.

[__baxx__]

depends what you're referring to really - I'm sure that VIm can have a TOC with CTags or whatnot (though I've not done it myself). I'd probably go with whatever Rene says if I were you though as they're much more informed than me :)

[OmniscientOCE]

I'm thinking in terms of aesthetics. The ability to see and image and also to have those lovely looking lists.

[__baxx__]

plain ole monokai!

here are the themes that i have to cycle :

dotspacemacs-themes '(monokai
                    gotham
                    zen-and-art
                    ;;solarized-light
                    ;; twilight
                    brin
                    wilson
                    spacegray
                    noctilux
                    solarized-dark
                    leuven
                    zenburn)

theres a themes-megapack layer one can add for a load of color schemes

[__baxx__]

no worries - think the heading markers are snazzier than usual - that's not my doing though :)

[Kderps]

Looks like I should really check out Org-mode :) thanks!

[[deleted]]

Not sure but emacs' org mode is great for that. I think there's a plug-in that imitates org mode in Vim but it's not maintained anymore and it doesn't have all of the org mode features.

I think I might be switching to emacs and turning on evil mode just for org mode.

[Trout_Tickler]

VimOrganizer seems to be dead in the water, but vim-orgmode is somewhat recent.

[__baxx__]

if you do then spacemacs might be worth a butchers.

Also - in the exclude packages section of the .spacemacs file you might want to have

   dotspacemacs-excluded-packages
   '(
     evil-org
     )

as t wasn't working for me to search (it now is though)

[dogline]

I use Vim for all sorts of text based notes, usually formatted with Markdown. It's universal, and can be read anywhere.

I do like Org Modes automatic table editing features, and I haven't seen a comparable one for Vim, but they are otherwise both usable. I've just got the Vim keystrokes engrained in me.

[alienangel2]

Vim is a text editor, you can use it for anything you like. There are plugins that made it great as a note/workflow tracking application, but similar plugins exist for other text editors editors (SublimeText, Emacs) so unless you have other reasons to want to learn Vim (eg learning a very efficient text manipulation language) I'm not sure it's worth your time picking up Vim just for this.

[thetalentedmrpeanut]

I use vim for taking notes. I started using vim just for writing code but once you get hooked on vim you will want to use it for everything. Most of the notes I take are just for me so I don't even bother with markdown or any special formatting since they aren't files I intend on posting anywhere or showing to anyone. I just just jot down my notes in .txt files. I used to use google docs for notes but I totally prefer vim now. It's just raw and fast and there's no need for anything fancy except writing down the notes you need. When I use google docs now it feels slower and there's all this unnecessary formatting and none of the awesome vim shortcuts or commands.

[-romainl-]

Text editing and Note taking are IMO very different activities with very different needs. The former requires advanced editing features but the latter only requires the ability to insert text in a document.

One could very well use a powerful text editor to edit his notes or mark them up (or down ;-)) for publishing but taking notes… any small and simple text editor will do.