Writing Better With Vim

Writing Better With Vim

How are we to write better quality texts, faster? The spectrum of assistant programs that aid us in writing texts has increased dramatically. From Word itself that has an outstanding grammar checker bundled in, to grammarly, or more into the command line tools diction and vim, the choices seem endless. Since my focus is using the same writing tool for everything, I settled on Vim, and I use only 2 settings.

1. Spell Checking

To enable spell checking in Vim, simply set the spell setting using:

:set spell

This enables spell checking, so basic mistakes such as mistyped words are immediately caught. This is a no-brainer and you don’t need any plugins for it.

2. Wordy

This second one is a Vim plugin that enables powerful wording checks. You can enable what checks you want for your documents.

For example it checks for "weasel words" such as: very, or many, that are not explicit in meaning, and like the spell check plugin it underlines them.

What’s even cooler, is that you’re able to enable multiple rules simultaneously. I personally use "weasel" and the "passive-voice" rules:

let g:wordy#ring = [
  \ ['weasel', 'passive-voice', ],
  \ ]

And they’re automatically enabled when I open any asciidoc file:

"
" Asciidoc
"
function! AsciiDocFile()
    set filetype=asciidoc
    NextWordy
endfunction

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.adoc call AsciiDocFile()
au BufRead,BufNewFile *.ad call AsciiDocFile()

Pretty awesome if you ask me.

Write something amazing!

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