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:
I just checked these out and Limelight feels wonderful when editing and reading prose in Vim! I will definitely be using this in the future - especially when writing things for my blog.
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.
I agree - sometimes it is too easy to get lost when people create plugins for simple configuration options that are already built-in.
I feel similarly, but I could see folks who use vim as more of an IDE finding this useful.
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!
I usually do one line per sentence when writing papers. But a co-author will usually mess that up, so I could see some value to a plugin…
Ahh I thought I was the only one! One line per sentence makes the diffs so much nicer too, maybe we need git hooks to reject multiple sentences per line?
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.
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.
A source control tool such as git or mercurial will solve this. Any collaborator who uses vi should have no issues with a git/hg workflow for managing changes.
Version control is not editing.