Tag Archives: Commonplace

How I use vimwiki in neovim

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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.

On Keeping a Commonplace book/site

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From Wikipedia:

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
Wikipedia extract on Commonplace books.

As soon as I heard about the idea of a commonplace I was immediately interested and wanted to start keeping one myself. But then I soon realised — my website is kind of on the way to becoming what I would call my own commonplace. I tend to write about a bunch of things that interest me, and had even begun saving quotes from the few books I read.

Not only will this give me a new angle at which to come at mt personal site from, I think it will even aid in ridding me of the occasional writer’s block, whatever that is. If I start writing little and often — some personal notes and some posts — it can only do good things for my writing habits. 🙂

External Links

How and why to keep a commonplace book — Ryan Holiday.

Marginalia — Wikipedia.

Mark Twain’s Marginalia.

Everyone Should Keep A Commonplace Book: Great Tips From People Who Do.

All about commonplacing.

How to Keep a Digital Commonplace.