"These days I oscillate between vim and the E2 editor"

- Wertperch, on composing writeups


The above quote is from a correspondence I had recently on the topic of using software to compose writeups (this conversation was precipitated by the invasion of the character "Ã" in the e2 editor and drafts. I mentioned that I somewhat-vaguely recall Andycyca telling me at some point that he uses Pandoc to compose all of his writeups, and then exports them as html and into the E2 editor. I was saying that I was considering doing something comparable with either Deepdwn or Obsidian, two popular Markdown writers right now.

This tickled my fancy, and I decided to try my hand at writing in Vim. In fact, this very writeup was written in Vim. However, upon opening a text file in Vim, I found its lack of margins to be a bit wonky -- no different from writing in Notepad or any IDE with word wrapping turned on; the words simply wrapped at the boundary of the window (or, in this case, my screen, since I like the fullscreen terminal.)

Of course, I immediately searched the internet for a plugin or modification that would bring margins to Vim. I said to myself, because Vim so obscenely popular, someone has to have made this!

Goyo is a plugin for Vim. It can be installed with a plugin manager such as Vim-plug. It gives Vim margins -- moreover, you can choose to customize these margins if you so choose. In order to use it once installed, I simply enter the command ":Goyo" after opening the file. I can save just as well too; I can punch in ":w" (write to file) at any time, even while Goyo is active. When I'm finished and I want to ":q" (quit), I will need to enter it twice; the first quit simply takes me out of Goyo.

All in all, I think this is nifty! I might start using this a lot more -- Jdarkroom has a few kinks that I don't like too much, so I might transition to this until I find my "holy grail" text editor.

Here is a screenshot of me using this for this writeup. Say cheese!


This was going to be for Brevity Quest 2022, but I am too wordy.