Train Bridge at Swarthmore College crossing Crum Creek

Vim for Blog Writing

For a while I was using IDE’s like Atom or Sublime to write my blog posts but I found it annoying to switch between the terminal and the IDE constantly. The two things I needed were working syntax highlighting and spell checking so a full IDE was overkill.

Markdown Syntax Highlighting

I was having issues having Vim understand the syntax of my .md files so I had to add a special rule to treat them as such. It treats all files ending in .md as markdown but that works for me. Add the line to your .vimrc and you’re set.

au BufNewFile,BufFilePre,BufRead *.md set filetype=markdown

Spell Check

First add this set spelllang=en_us to your .vimrc file. This sets the language the spell checker will use. When you want to start the spell checker type :set spell and to disabled it :set nospell. Pretty easy to remember.

Assuming there are actually misspellings in your article words will get highlighted red. The [s and ]s commands are used to jump backwards and forwards to the next misspelled words. Use z= to correct the word under the cursor and use zg to add the word to the local dictionary.