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A minimal Vim, Markdown, and GPG powered wiki

Jun 21, 2021 vim unix minimalism

Motivation and Vimwiki

Lately, I’ve been keeping notes, ideas, to-do lists, and journal entries in a test based wiki, thanks to the fantastic plugin vimwiki. If you’re not familiar, vimwiki enables easy hyperlinking between text files marked up with either Markdown or a feature rich vimwiki syntax. This can be a collection of programming language snippets, notes from CS class, project to-do lists, a personal diary—whatever you want. You can navigate between linked files withandand even convert to HTML to view in a browser. I’m actually in the process of creating my own minimal plugin with a subset of the vimwiki features I actually use, along with some other customizations, since a lot of the behavior I desire can be emulated within vanilla vim with ./relative/paths and gf. Either way, a markdown/plain text based wiki offers many advantages, as it can be version controlled with git, takes up kBs of space, can be efficiently synced across computers, and encrypted for privacy. I tried other note taking apps like Joplin, Standard Notes, but why install an Electron app when we can use some Vimscript?

Markdown

Markdown has become my go-to markup language for notes and lists. It offers the essential features of a simple markup language, while staying easy to use with its syntax. I often make use of the checkboxes and tables to keep track of lists and information, which are nice additions alongside the basics of making text bold or italicized and organizing sections and lists. Plus, since it’s just plain text, unlike a Microsoft Word document, I can edit it in vim (with the help of vim-markdown), interact with it via unix command line tools,

An example markdown wiki

## to-do
- [ ] wash the dishes
- [ ] take out the trash
- [X] study

## projects
### games
- [pong](./projects/pong.md)
- [space invaders](./projects/invaders.md)

### other
- [garden](./projects/garden.md)
- [blog](./projects/blog.md)

## university classes
- Algorithms
- Number Theory
- Electrodynamics
- Metaphysics
- Statistics

Vim

GPG

POSIX shell

last modified: Apr 26, 2024 (79b14c8)

the content for this site is CC-BY-NC-ND

the source code is MIT

git mail pgp