Keeping a Diary in Vim

A diary is a good way to write down one's thoughts and memories of the day.

Being a vim fan, I had to find a way to easily help me write down my diary. This is where vim wiki comes in. It is basically a means of writing down wikis in vim, and has an awesome diary mode.

I use vundle as my vim plugin manager. So to install vimwiki, I added to the following to my vimrc file:

Plugin 'vimwiki/vimwiki'

And then ran the following from withing vim (while the vimrc file is the current buffer):

:source %
:PluginInstall

To enter diary mode, I just type <leader>wi in any vim session and it will direct me into the diary entries.

To add a diary on the day's happenings, I just type <leader>w<leader>w and it will open a blank buffer. When this is saved it will be a new day's entry.

To update the diary with the new entry, <leader>wi will take you to the page containing the various entries. Then type <leader>w<leader>i and this will update the list with the new entry.

Since I use vim a lot, I find this really useful when collecting my thoughts during a day.

So in summary these are the commands helpful for vimwiki diary mode:

<leader>w<leader>w " create new diary note for the day
<leader>wi " show all diary entries
<leader>w<leader>i " update entries