I recently (finally) moved a bunch of my poems and short stories and other writings off of Google Docs and into a git repo of text files. Right now I’m editing them with VSCode or Zed, which I just found and like so far. Both are fine but not really geared toward writing not-code. What have y’all found that you like writing in?
I’m surprised no one mentioned emacs. I’ve not done much with version control lately but back when I was coding at a day job, emacs was king. All the important version control functions are mapped to key bindings and macros.
Emacs functions graphically with a mouse for novices, which makes it good for starting off. Then as you get more advanced you memorise bindings for frequent functions so the mouse slows you down less and less. The default keybindings in emacs have become ubiquitous so e.g. many of the emacs bindings work in BASH and other apps. So when you learn emacs, your knowledge becomes portable outside of emacs.
A lot of the same can be said for vi variants. But that’s mostly it. Editors other than emacs and vi are isolated and less powerful – though I’ve not really looked hard outside of emacs lately so things may have changed.
I am too, now that you mention it. I started using vim early in my career because my team lead used it, and I never really had occasion to switch to emacs as I usually used a graphical IDE for most development work, and vim was mostly for editing individual files. Might have to give it a spin.
For writing i use Obsidian with the git plugin.
I want to give Obsidian a real try. I have seen it around but never used it, because it seems really complicated to operate and I haven’t felt like I have the brainpower to really get my head around it, but it looks interesting. Do you use the concept graph and all the other stuff or do you use it more as a plain old editor?
You can start using it as a plain editor, and wait with the plugins until you are more comfortable with the tool. You don’t have to go all in at once.
