Vim/Neovim Plugins for Writing

alpha2phi
4 min readMay 11, 2021

Vim/Neovim plugins for writers.

Distraction-Free Writing

Overview

In my previous article, I talked about Vim/Neovim plugins used to manage notes and to-do lists. Vim/Neovim, being a text editor, can also be a very efficient tool for writing. In this article, let’s explore plugins that writers can use to help them write books, documentation, etc.

Let’s start with some of the popular plugins.

goyo.vim + limelight.vim = Zen Mode

Distraction-Free Writing using Goyo and LimeLight

These 2 plugins normally go hand-in-hand. Both are popular options when people talk about distraction-free writing.

VSCode has a similar feature called Zen mode, and I actually prefer more this name. Nowadays with so many distractions, we all need Zen mode to focus on doing our tasks, whether it is coding or writing.

If you are looking for Neovim plugins only, try these plugins

Writing in Markdown

If you are writing in Markdown, the plugins below should be helpful.

  • vim-markdownfor syntax highlighting, matching rules, and mappings for the original Markdown and extensions.
  • vim-markdown-toc to generate a table of contents for Markdown files.
  • glow.nvim which is a glow plugin for you to preview Markdown directly in the Neovim buffer.
  • markdown-preview.nvim to preview Markdown in your modern browser with synchronized scrolling and flexible configuration, including rendering UML diagram, flowchart, sequence diagram, and Text math rendering.
  • vim-livedown is another alternative to preview Markdown using Livedown.

Writing in Latex

alpha2phi

Software engineer, Data Science and ML practitioner.