The writing software I use is not what you might expect. It is not what is advertised to writers—It’s not Plottr, it’s not Ellipsus, it’s not Google Docs or whatever happens to be trendy right now. It is Vim. Vim is Vi IMproved. It is a text editor from the nineties and it is geared towards working with plain text lines.
It might seem like a mighty odd choice, but Vim is highly configurable, with a baffling number of possibilities. You will likely want to set options in the vimrc and maybe even in other files. I have a collection of .vim files that I’ve placed in the plugin folder and I’ve installed some actual extensions like vim-pandoc and Goyo.
Taken all together Vim is an outstanding writing tool if you have the time to learn how to use it and to customize it so that it works well for you. Although many people recommend using hard line wrapping in the spirit of using a code editor, I think that’s only true if you’re coming to Vim from a programming standpoint; if you’re coming to Vim from word processors, like I was, soft line wrapping is probably going to be more comfortable and with some modifications Vim is perfectly capable of handling it. I use soft line wrapping and it works great for me.
I write in Markdown, which is a simple markup language for prose. Vim works very well as a Markdown editor. If you want to try it out be warned: Vim is very complex and it handles far differently from most apps you are probably used to. Vim is keyboard only software—that’s a lot of the appeal. It may be a selling point or a drawback depending on your disposition but I hate having to reach for a mouse when I’m dealing with words so for me it’s a selling point.
Vim is what I use for everything from simple notes to stories. It is very powerful, very efficient, and even kind of fun to use.
C.A. Exline is a writer of speculative fiction and non-fiction. You can find some of his work on Medium. Be sure to check it out for Linux and open source reviews and recommendations.
