Recently I’ve been writing much more than I used to: long emails, software documentation, personal Wiki, keeping work journal, blogging, writing challenges… Luckily enough, I do all of this writing in Vim. But sometimes writing prose in Vim might feel a bit unnatural, especially if you have a wide screen: text will be on the very left side of the screen, or (if textwrap is not enabled) you’ll end up with lines hundreds of characters long. And overall, editing text in Vim sometimes might feel a bit clunky - with all the extra information and high-tech (or low-tech, depending on your perspective) look.

I found a simple, yet sufficient solution for this issue: VimRoom. It’s a Vim plugin which enters distraction-free writing mode, by centering the 80-character block of text on your screen. It’s highly configurable, and I found it to look especially pleasing on vertical monitors (which I prefer to use for writing). It looks presentable even on smaller screens though, here’s a screenshot:

VimRoom plugin in use.

Install the plugin (use a package manager like Vundle or Pathogen to simplify the task) and add a following line to your .vimrc:

nnoremap <Leader>vr :VimroomToggle<CR>

Now, hit <Leader>vr to drop in/out of the VimRoom mode (<Leader is a backslash \ character by default).

GitHub link: https://github.com/mikewest/vimroom.