[CLUE-Tech] Reliable writing editors?

[David Anselmi]

Jeffery Cann wrote:
> Greetings.
> 
> I generally use VIM for most of my work.  However, when I need to write prose 
> (often in in text format), I find VIM hard to work with.  I love it for 
> coding, but not for writing.

You arent' very specific about your requirements (aren't you some sort 
of high level guy that should know better? ;-)  Not sure I understand 
your complaint about hitting esc.  Maybe you just need some more practice?

I recently had to copy from one Word doc to another, but the original 
format was impossible to paste correctly (it was a list generated from 
section headings).  So I pasted it into vim, cleaned it, then pasted 
back into Word.  Then I formatted it by adding styles to each paragraph.

What I did, write in text, format in word is exactly what things like 
LaTeX are good for.  First you write and organize, then you format 
(especially if it will be a professional editor doing the typesetting). 
  I try to work that way whichever program I'm using.  You can read some 
interesting stuff about typesetting (after the writing is done) here:

http://www.kohala.com/start/#typesetting

(he uses troff, not as easy as LaTeX, I think).

The nice thing about vim (and bash, psql, and other readline systems) is 
that your fingers already know what to do.  And you can edit 
programmatically rather than by mouse.  (Emacs is the same in these, of 
course).

Dave