I've used vim as a prose editor in addition to a code editor for a long time.

For me, Goyo was the plugin that always matched what I wanted vim to become when I was in "prose writing mode."

https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

I combine with limelight.vim:

https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim

This partially simulates the experience/UX of the product iA Writer on macOS or iPad, which is my favorite prose editor, but is proprietary software and doesn't work on Linux.

As others mentioned, when in prose writing mode you can also flip on a handful of vim options, I save these as hotkeys in my vimrc. For example, spell checking and line wrapping.

In case you're curious:

https://github.com/amontalenti/home/blob/master/.vimrc

I'm not sure if vim-pencil addresses this, but I find writing in the online typst editor to be a delight, particularly its soft-wrap mode and its auto-indent.

Even though I have a very narrow editor when you type for example:

    this is a very very long sentence
      - this is a very incredibly long sentence too

    this is a very very
    long sentence
      - this is a very
        incredibly long
        sentence too

Vim is my only text editor, I use it for writing everything. Emails, scripts, messages, 100k+ lines codebases, prose, never needed this plugin. One line for 80 char wrap on certain filetypes, and a that is it, never needed such a plugin.

For prose, you can simply hard wrap at 80 (arguably you should), and vim supports this via a single config line. OOTB vim soft breaks anyway and you can navigate between in those broken lines via gj, gk etc.

Seems like bloat to me.

As someone who writes academic essays and prose, I can't live without this plugin. I will constantly need to write multiple page paragraphs, and it's incredibility more convient to be able to navigate within a paragraph as if it was multiple lines, as opposed to needing to perform some horizontal motion gymnastics to get the cursor where I need it to be.

Hat's off to everyone who has worked on this plugin!

This is neat, but I think I would avoid it given the speed with which I can make edits in Vim.

One thing I’ve learned about writing prose vs. code is that you should not be quick to edit your prose and instead continue writing and finish the complete draft. This is why studies show that typewriters and pen and paper give a better creative process. I can’t foresee me looking for things like autocomplete or pure speed when trying to put thoughts to paper.

I can't remember who suggested it, but I'm sold on the idea that if you're committing your drafts to version control, then you should break your lines at syntactic points: at the end of a short sentence, or at the ends of the component phrases of a longer sentence. This should typically lead to a cleaner and more readily comprehensible version history.

Of course, this assumes that you're writing in Markdown or ASCIIDoc or something else that will get processed into the final displayed form. But even with plain text, you could always run it through fmt or something similar.

> Think of them as the composable building blocks of a domain specific language for manipulating text, one that can become a powerful tool in expressing yourself.

Writers are renown for ther love of coding domain specific languages!

They'd even trade such writing fundamentals like bold in nicely looking proportional fonts for that!

for writing - instead, it might've been more useful of a plugin if it was targeted at specific problem. Example - creative writing - if you had LSP-like feature on top that can link to characters, scenes, add scenes, find chapters, jump between content. Add character bio, traits and more and have easy "peak" as in a function signature to see details. I know it's different than what the plugin showcases, just sharing thoughts on what I find as a meaningful feature add. here, it's just as commented below, it's basically Vim.

I'll keep using Symantec GrandView. For writing non-code, it outclasses anything mentioned so far by a considerable degree.

Is there a way to do the equivalent of Word's 'track changes' feature in Vim/Neovim? As an editor who reviews manuscripts in Word, I want to be able to make edits, have the author review/approve them, then clean up the result into a file that goes to the typesetter. If I could do that, then a plugin like this becomes potentially more useful to our workflow.