Vim as a blogging tool

#If I can do it in Vim, I’ll be happy

##But if I can’t do it in vim, then I won’t

Because there are so many other things I need to do that can be done in vim.

This has been at least part of my inability to keep my past blog attempts up-to-date. I believed that there was some “best practice” structure that I wasn’t using that would make blogging the simple and enjoyable hobby that it seems to be for so many people. I guess this is not the case. However, I am using a great template that I like (HPSTR, by Michael Rose) and I am starting to get the markdown-jekyll-github cycle better (thanks to Andee Kaplan and Alex Shum) so this is getting easier. It also helps that I started this time intentionally using vim and building my workflow around vim. I wrote the following two functions with the goal of making blogging easier.

##The functions

At the moment, I have my blog on github, which is synched with

1	~/github/imouzon.github.io/

on my computer. I use R for most of my coding. For example, instead of directly using TeX, I use

1
.rnw

files and compile the code through knitr even when the amount of R code in the document is negligible. The main reason I do this is that I wrote a bunch of functions that make using rnw files so easy that writing even a plain LaTeX document is much faster if I start with the rnw file. For the same reason, I am using Rmarkdown files and creating markdown files from them. This can (I have been told) cause problems with github and thus I have created an folder Rmarkdown in my page folder that is include in my .gitignore.

So starting a new post, which will alway be stored initially in

1	~/github/imouzon.github.io/Rmarkdown/

requires a few steps which are always basically the same. The following vim function helps me do this:

function! NewPost(...)
   "where is the \_posts folder located?
   let blog_base_folder = "~/github/imouzon.github.io/"

   "what is today's date
   let blogdate = strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

   "did a title get submitted
   if a:0 > 0
      let blogtitle = a:1
   else
      let blogtitle = "thoughts"
   end

   let blogloc = blog_base_folder."Rmarkdown/".blogdate."-".blogtitle.".rmd"

   "open the new blog post
   execute "sp " blogloc
endfunction

And I created the quick command:

"make a new blog post quickly
nmap <Leader>pp :call NewPost()<CR>

Additionally, using R and knitr to create the markdown file from the Rmarkdown file requires another set of steps that are basically the same. Thus I wrote the following vim function:

   function! KnitMD(...)
      if a:0 > 0
         let post_folder = a:1
      else
         let post_folder = '~/github/imouzon.github.io/_posts/'
      end
      let knit_cmd = 'silent !r --no-save --no-restore -e "require(knitr); knit(\"%\")"'
      execute knit_cmd
      execute 'silent !mv %:t:r.md ~/github/imouzon.github.io/_posts/%:t:r.md'
      execute "echom(\'A new post has been created in the _posts directory\')"
   endfunction

   "mp for make post
   nnoremap <silent> <Leader>mp :call KnitMD()<CR>

Note: LOL that the jekyll highlight tag for code written to be run by vim is vim and not vimscript.

Vim as a blogging tool

October 20, 2014

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