Vim – Emanote

Vim, and its very popular fork Neovim, are modal text editors for editing plain text files. You can use it to edit Markdown files.

Tip

If you are looking to write a Vim extension for Emanote, see Export.

Known issues

Glitches when saving file

Vim editors have a feature that clashes with Emanote and can cause slight glitchy hickups when saving a file, while producing logs such as:

[Info#emanote] [15:52:41] Re-registering file: ./docs/4913 R[/4913]
[Info#emanote] [15:52:41] Removing note: guide.md
[Info#emanote] [15:52:41] Reading file: ./docs/guide.md
[Info#emanote] [15:52:47] Re-registering file: ./docs/4913 R[/4913]
[Info#emanote] [15:52:47] Removing note: guide.md
[Info#emanote] [15:52:47] Reading file: ./docs/guide.md
[Info#emanote] [15:52:50] Re-registering file: ./docs/4913 R[/4913]
[Info#emanote] [15:52:50] Removing note: guide.md
[Info#emanote] [15:52:50] Reading file: ./docs/guide.md

Compared to the much slimmer logs from when using for example Visual Studio Code:

[Info#emanote] [15:54:39] Reading file: ./docs/guide.md
[Info#emanote] [15:54:41] Reading file: ./docs/guide.md
[Info#emanote] [15:54:43] Reading file: ./docs/guide.md

Temporary workaround

(No longer applies after restarting Vim)

:set backupcopy=yes

Permanent workaround

By adding this to your (Neo)vim config file, e.g ~/.vimrc for Vim or ~/.config/nvim/init.vim for Neovim (see :help vimrc for more info):

" Must be added AFTER `set nocompatible`, if any, as `set nocompatible`
" resets the `backupcopy` setting.
set backupcopy=yes

Background

Vim has this great feature called “backup copies” that ensure that your text isn’t lost in the case of a faulty write/save operation. To achieve this it uses some additional files, usually one with a 4-digit long integer and one with the same name but with a tilde at the end (e.g myfile.md vs myfile.md~), that it does this little dance with these files before discarding them when the write/save operation succeeds.

For more info about this feature, see :help backup, :help backupcopy, and :help writebackup.

This also affects good ’ol vi.

Reference discussion: https://github.com/srid/emanote/issues/180#issuecomment-945049455