Publishing a Blog in Vim with Vimpress

I like blogging.

I learned though that writing blogs is an art in organization and learning the tools used to make them. I reviewed blogging software before and said that I really liked Drivel. This week though may have changed all that. I decided to crash test Vimpress and test how she does. Now, I can say I’m really impressed. I am very possibly going to keep using it.

Vimpress is a plugin for Vim that allows editing and added posts to WordPress blogs. Vimpress also will list the posts written to easily go back and edit them. Blogging is as simple as BlogList, BlogNew, BlogOpen and BlogSend. Installation is easy enough, just put the blog and syntax file in their respective folders:

tar zxvf vimpress.tar.gz -C ~/.vim

Edit ~/.vim/plugin/blog.vim to point to WordPress php-file. Mine for example is http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php. And Vimpress will be ready. For more look at Vimpress’s homepage.

After I set it up, Typing in Vim and publishing in Vimpress does so without a hitch. Very nice. A couple things to keep in mind to help ease the transition…

Html markup will have to be learned. Only the basic tags need to be learned though (a href, img, pre…) not too bad. Also I find that the closetag plugin is a good idea. The closetag plugin maps ctrl-_ to close the tag. A few lines will need to be added to the ~/.vimrc for it to be active:

" Automatic tag closing for html and xml (closetag plugin)
autocmd Filetype html,xhtml,xml,xsl source ~/.vim/scripts/closetag.vim
let g:closetag_html_style=1
source ~/.vim/scripts/closetag.vim

Vimpress comes with a syntax file that highlights the BlogList and header, if html syntaxing is desired its easy enough to set:

:setfiletype html

I was hoping to find a way to nest html in the syntax file but haven’t just yet found out how.

Anyways, I’ve really liking using Vim and Vimpress so far. As I’ve said previously the learning scale is a bit more but well worth it. I need to learn some more about cutting and pasting in Vim (to and from the Xserver) to really be effective but I’m getting there.