Grip it! There are plenty of tools to make your .markdown or .md files in a html way- but is there a vim plugin that would make it more automated and integrated ? Let's answer this question, shall we ?

S0-E12/E30 :)

Vim note taking and a markdown files.

Vim is my favourite tool for making short notes. Also it works best as a IDE for python files.

But how to make those markdown files available on your machine without having to use any websites or puting it online ?

There's a way - besides those GUI apps that gives you that, you can actually make use of a Grip markdown renderer.

Grip!

Thanks to Joe Esposito you can watch on browser how you type-in your markdown file. Each time you will save your markdown file that is connected with grip, it will automatically refresh.

The project Grip is something that I personally use and used even at work for short exchanging of information within markdown files. You can actually have a server that's on your machine visible within your local network. (putting aside network-alike problems).

But in order to do that you have to have another script run in your system.

How to use it ?

First install grip with a pip (for global installation) or within your environment (first activate your virtual-env)

pip install grip

Than if the file is called README.md grip will automatically make use of it with command grip if you are in the same directory as mentioned file.

Grip actually will make a listing of files and you can access files from directory you started grip command.

I.e. you have 2 files in your directory : README.md and a-very-important-note.md.

Now what grip will do is select the README.md and make a html page when you open your browser at localhost:6419. Also you can go to localhost:6419/a-very-important-node.md and it will render your markdown file into html.

The configuration section within readme of grip gives you even a hint of possibility to change port number on which the service will work.

Vim integrations for markdown files

Is there any type of integration with vim and markdown that you could use ?

Vim-Markdown

It's an integration for vim that reutilize power of vim to make markdown experience more vim-alike.

I.e. this page is a markdown file that I'm currently writing! And I'm using Vim-Markdown that presents a TOC (Table Of Contents) on the right when I put in vim-exec mode :

:Toc

Also you can check all your links in md file if they link to proper site.

Github project site Vim-Markdown by plasticboy.

Vim-Wiki

It's a Markdown integration for making notes as a type of Wiki. You start with your index.md and then you can create all your notes within vim.

Checkout github project page

The only minus of this is that at this point you have to use a special type of syntax and a .wiki extensions.

Thanks!

That's it :) Comment, share or don't :)

If you have any suggestions what I should blog about in the next articles - please give me a hint :)

See you tomorrow! Cheers!