Writing notes using Markdown and Vim - My setup⌗

I’m currently in my fourthfifth year of studying computer science and during this time I’ve needed to write a lot of notes. After roughly a year using Onenote and ended up on a combination of tools I really liked. Vim and markdown. In this post I will go through why I made that choice, what my setup is and some final thoughts.

My first year I used Onenote, a note taking app part of Microsofts office. It worked okay, it let me do notetaking using a digital pen and allowed export to pdf. It also synced nicely to the cloud. After some time I fell in love with Vim on Linux and that left me without the possibility of using Onenote. So I tried note taking in Vim. I really like using my preferred editor (software engineers sometimes have one) that I was fluent with. Using the OSs filesystem to create a hierarchy for the notes also was just easier. It let me do all my normal operations I have grown accustomed to in the terminal. I also felt more in control of the notes, not being scared of Onenote crashing on me and messing up whatever file type it is using to represent the notepads. With Markdown it was just me and a text file.

Why markdown?

• Easy to compile to pdf, html whatever with Pandoc
• Simple syntax
• Popular format
• Pandocs version supports latex for math

My setup now consists of setting the line length to 80 so it autowraps when hitting a limit. I have enabled Vims built in spellchecker and some handy keybindings to interact with it. My settings are gathered in a Vim-plugin. Mostly to see how you make a plugin, it is not a very comprehensive solution.

Currently backup (and in some way online syncing) is done with a simple cron-job

> cat /etc/cron.daily/copy_notes
#!/bin/bash
rsync -a --delete /home/theodorc/notater api.theodorc.no:/home/theodorc/notater

Future plans⌗

I have heard good things about Obsidian which can give a better structure and possibly easier online syncing.