Month: April 2023

How I use vimwiki in neovim

This post is currently in-progress, and is more of a brain-dump right now. But I like to share as often as I can otherwise I’d never share anything 🙂

Please view the official Vimwiki Github repository for up-to-date details of Vimwiki usage and installation. This page just documents my own processes at the time.

Installation

Add the following to plugins.lua

use "vimwiki/vimwiki"

Run the following two commands separately in the neovim command line:

:PackerSync
:PackerInstall

Close and re-open Neovim.

How I configure Vimwiki

I have 2 separate wikis set up in my Neovim.

One for my personal homepage and one for my commonplace site.

I set these up by adding the following in my dotfiles, at the following position: $NEOVIM_CONFIG_ROOT/after/plugin/vimwiki.lua. So for me that would be ~/.config/nvim/after/plugin/vimwiki.lua.

You could also put this command inside the config function in your plugins.lua file, where you require the vimwiki plugin. I just tend to put all my plugin-specific settings in their own “after/plugin” files for organisation.

vim.cmd([[
  let wiki_1 = {}
  let wiki_1.path = '~/vimwiki/website/'
  let wiki_1.html_template = '~/vimwiki/website_html/'
  let wiki_2 = {}
  let wiki_2.path = '~/vimwiki/commonplace/'
  let wiki_2.html_template = '~/vimwiki/commonplace_html/'
  let g:vimwiki_list = [wiki_1, wiki_2]
  call vimwiki#vars#init()
]])

The path keys tell vimwiki where to plave the root index.wiki file for each wiki you configure.

The html_template keys tell vimwiki where to place the compiled html files (when running the :VimwikiAll2HTML command).

I keep them separate as I am deploying them to separate domains on my server.

When I want to open and edit my website wiki, I enter 1<leader>ww.

When I want to open and edit my commonplace wiki, I enter 2<leader>ww.

Pressing those key bindings for the first time will ask you if you want the directories creating.

How I use vimwiki

At the moment, my usage is standard to what is described in the Github repository linked at the top of this page.

When I develop any custom workflows I’ll add them here.

Deployment

Setting up a server to deploy to is outside the scope of this post, but hope to write up a quick guide soon.

I run the following command from within vim on one of my wiki index pages, to export that entire wiki to html files:

:VimwikiAll2HTML

I then SCP the compiled HTML files to my server. Here is an example scp command that you can modify with your own paths:

scp -r ~/vimwiki/website_html/* your_user@your-domain.test:/var/www/website/public_html

For the best deployment experience, I recommend setting up ssh key authentication to your server.

For bonus points I also add a bash / zsh alias to wrap that scp command.