Using Markdown in vim

My posts are written in Markdown, by using the wonderful BlueCloth library, as I discussed in this earlier post.

Considering this is my first Rails project, it definitely lacks a certain… sophistication. For example, posts are either published and live, or don’t exist yet. And also, I don’t have any autosave mechanism.

These two areas of want combined to make me a very sad panda one day. After writing up the post of the day, I may have restarted my computer, forgetting that I had a lovely work of writing in progress. Whoops. Got a little upset by that.

Until I have time to implement those two features, I found a suitable stop-gap: vim! So I’ve taken to simply writing stuff up in vim, and when it’s ready, copy, paste, and publish. Easy peasy.

But where would vim be without some syntax highlighting? NOWHERE! Well, it’s still pretty awesome regardless, but I don’t think many would disagree that syntax highlighting is a bad thing.

While there isn’t support out of box, some clever fellow wrote something up to do the trick. While I’m sure you could easily browse there to see how to do this, I’ll reproduce it here as well.

Download this, and place it in ~/.vim/syntax/ (of course, creating it if it doesn’t exist).

Now create, or add to ~/.vim/filetype.vim:

" markdown filetype file
if exists("did\_load\_filetypes")
 finish
endif
augroup markdown
 au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.mkd   setfiletype mkd
augroup END

And then to ~/.vimrc and/or ~/.gvimrc

 augroup mkd
  autocmd BufRead *.mkd  set ai formatoptions=tcroqn2 comments=n:>
 augroup END

I kind of feel like a plugin, or something, could take care of this for you, but I don’t know enough vim voodoo to sure.

Now you have vim markdown goodness… Enjoy!