Introduction

Creating markdown tables in Vim is not very intuitive. Out of the box Vim does not have the capability of formatting markdown tables. And manually keeping them formatted is no less than a tedious job. For reasons like these, I have for years avoided using tables in markdown. But a good thing about Vim is that it’s very easy to customize it and add new functionalities. Recently I spent some time to make the task of creating and keeping markdown tables formatted a little easier in Vim.

Introduction

I primarily take notes in vim in markdown format. The upside is that editing in vim is a pleasure. But one downside of this approach is that my notes often contain images and rich texts (as opposed to plain texts) and vim out of the box is not a good tool to view anything that is more than just text. In this post, I discuss about how you can easily preview your markdown notes in your browser directly from your vim editor with the help of a small vim script and an utility called pandoc in just a couple of keystroke. All without a fancy external vim plugin.

MediaWiki is a very popular free and open-source wiki software that powers some of the most visited wikis on the Internet including the Wikipedia. You can also host it in your own environment for your own wiki requirements or for your organization.

At my work, we use MediaWiki for our developer's wiki site. When I started working for a new product team sometimes back, I came to know about this wiki format for the first time and I didn't like it very much.

Though Vim is my favourite command-line text editor, not all the default configurations suit my taste. Luckily, changing the default configurations of Vim editor on my Xubuntu 14.04 LTS (any Linux based OS for that matter) is fairly easy and so is persisting the changes. Here's what you need to do in order to persist the changed configurations for Vim editor (so that the changes do not disappear after you restart your Vim editor): Create a file with name .vimrc and save it in your home directory. So whatever configurations you write in that .vimrc file of yours, will be picked when you start your Vim editor (after modifying .vimrc, you may need to restart the Vim editor in order for the changes to take effect).