My Semi-Complete VimWiki Workflow

Key Takeaways

let's go in on everyone back a chicken with another vim wiki video so I've actually started taking vim wiki more seriously than just casual usage I restructured my entire setup I made the links more robust I started using the cool diary feature of vim wiki and have more things set up and I actually am creating a real like real wiki for some of my statistics research so currently my vim wiki directory looks like this so you come in and I have all these folders in here I talked about in a previous video about how you could manually set and create new folders but I don't remember if I talked about how the links would work if you just made a new link in that folder I think that they just start off as relative you know within the current directory type links and that it would still work anyways but I made this a little bit more robust especially with there's something I don't know anyways I found a really great cheat sheet that shows me several things you look list and select so WS then we keep by default has some key bindings it will let you use so I can do leader WS and it will actually let me select from from my wiki's currently I'm on you know the home but I have all these other wiki's listed out now where you get these from is your vim RC when you set your setting for your vim wiki and I'll show you how to do that in a second but I decided to separate everything out into larger categories also to clean up the directory because I just had everything sure I had separate categories and stuff in my index but all the files were in a single directory so one thing I noticed that was also an issue was file overriding so let's say I have you know notes and research for two different programming languages and then in my case it was rust in Python and I had a note for each language called data types or data structures and anytime I wrote a new one for that language well that names already taken so it would actually either go to the same file or when I moved everything it actually over wrote some of the files luckily I had backup notes because I just moved all this stuff from Joplin so I just copy and pasted a new copy but how I got around this is I created subfolders and basically sub wikis of each of those languages in domain areas because that way the notes are only linked in that they're linked relatively and within that directory so in the Python directory I can have data types data structures and it works just fine I can have my rust directory which is another sub wiki and have data structures and data types and it works just fine now I set all this up and I cleaned and moved everything today and it took a couple hours even with you know good commands like if I was gonna read change a bunch of links that had a same common word I actually did you set a couple times but even then it still just took a while to maneuver things and figure out how I wanted stuff set up and structured so I have all these like main areas this is my normal index wiki my home wiki now in here I actually don't have anything why I just have my index file because I just wanted this clean and I wanted to able to see like what areas I had other stuff in now in each of these other areas I can have like different folders and all this stuff is represented on these index files because each of these directories has its own index file because it's each of them are their own wiki so like within tech I have all my different programming languages markup and other languages and then I have a growing thing for applications they Maki's one of them because I found these great note documents or documents about vim wiki because I've also seen that some people say there's not really a lot of research or good documentation or comprehensive documentation on vim wiki and yeah I mean it's hard to find some good stuff and I found some really great things which is what really spurred me on to really dive into this a little bit more I am using the markdown syntax not the native vim wiki syntax and I think that affects me being able to convert things to HTML I'm not sure but anyways I found the the for through this cheat sheet that I found it's the darndest thing comm slash vim wiki cheat sheet this shoe is really useful mostly for like these ones up here the wiki and diary management now if I do leader WW it'll take me to my home index file which is the top level of my entire wiki set up really useful I had made a custom command that would just do the same thing or it would just like I think it runs like command vim wiki home or something and that would actually work and it would take me back here but oh it already exists as a leader command so ww there I am now one thing I like is this new diary feature in vim wiki which is really cool that I saw I think on a YouTube account that hasn't been active in like four years Colby cheese or something anyways if I do leader W leader I it'll take on so that's the index leader W leader W it'll take me to my current current days post in the diary file and how do I see I'm still learning this a leader W eyes index open current leader WW Oh W T that's that one okay leader WT will take me to oh it's another tab no I'm still figuring out the keys but in any case I can just backspace from here and go back up to the index for the Diary file but what I really like about this is that I can do leader WI and it will actually build this index every day so it'll already just create this for me chronologically ordered there's a plug-in called calendar vim that will open up like a sort of like a nerd tree type interface like this but it'll actually be a calendar you can select that and we'll take you to your diary entry for that day so that's really cool I don't think I have it set up and I didn't have it set up for some reason I think I had a conflict or something but in any case I don't really care for that at the indexing works just fine for me and then I could always just grep the titles or something or the dates because you can see the link in here like it actually has the title but there's also a date so if I really cared I could just grab it and then see the line or whatever not everything has to be graphical but every time I create a new entry like if today was you know the next day it's not that currently it's up to the fifth so anything I entered today is on there but if it was the sixth tomorrow I could do leader WW and it would actually open up a brand new file that was say that would save to be the next day's entry which would be for six and in that case like if I do leader WW just takes me to sorry leader W leader W takes me to today's and the first line is actually the name that the relative link will be given and everything else after that is completely up to you so some cool things I was doing with this I'm not really keeping anything personal in the vehm wiki diary stuff just because I think writing a personal diary electronically or even physically I've seen enough television shows to know that that it's never really ending that never really ends well but I have like my dev log in here so anytime I do any sort of development stuff I want it highlight it in here and this is just what I'm keeping in here I have some basic like bolding and stuff and I found out that I really wanted to do timestamps like what if I update my entry throughout the day and I want to see you like just want to be like super granular about my detail and I want to see all of the details like a timestamp from my current entry I didn't wanna have to type this out I wanted to just be a snapshot single command at it and then I'm already ready to start typing you know the vim way well I found out that there's a really cool well not really it's not really a really cool command it's just hey you run a show command and it's just the date shell command like if I ran date there it is so that's it it's really just running this command and from within them using the shell commands so I mapped that to leader and then type out now so it also will give me and also bold it and then also start me off an insert mode on the next like two lines down so I have it a nice break so if I do leader now it'll do that for me so I like that delete that so yeah I'm just messing with this and I actually I really like this diary feature so I also have been messing with to do I'm studying a lot of statistics right now and just got really back into it so I'm trying to refresh myself from like my Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt from my my college class and just some of the materials I have I'm just trying to review everything catch back up and remember everything because like if you don't use that stuff often it just kind of just slips away it's a little bit familiar still but I'm trying to catch back up but I'm actually using the statistics sub wiki as like my real like deep dive project into wiki creation like if I go to mean I can actually this probably a good one but I have some low-tech math formulas in here that I've been making so that way I can see like the formulas if I ever wanted to really look at them but I'm also have templates so I have like explained documentation code because they program primarily in are I want to have the are code to do these pieces of analysis excuse me I have like any explanation about like whatever I want to know about it along with a law tech formula if one exists for it and then documentation is just like resources that I find that help the subject make sense to me which is something about this formula function thing and then code is just how it would work in our so a really good one I think would probably be p-value this is when I just finished editing last night so I have like links to like these other different things 1-sided 2-sided values I can go to that link why is it not we're not working I guess that's still an error from the move but in any case no hypothesis I can go there it'll take me here then I can go back to p-value and back to the null hypothesis and I just have all these different links in here and also just explanations of all this stuff from the resources I've been researching and what I really like about it is that I can easily just go to back to it and forth between different values and doodoo and I can easily just move around and find things like if I have a question I'm like rushing up on variants that I'm liking okay so I need to figure out how the data is spread around the population mean how do I calculate the mean I mean bear with me how do I calculate the mean go there okay that's how I do it go back and then I can go and see the variance okay but then if I square root the square root of the variance I get the standard deviation what is that again go there find that out and then oh range is a key word what does range again go there and just making it more wiki-like I can go follow these links down a rabbit hole I can go back and forth and I can review as I go and find things that make sense to me and review the resources that I need as I go about it and so I find this is a very great way for me to I keep up on understanding this stuff and it's really it's also just really fun for me to build but the process of doing something like this and taking notes like this is also like reinforcing that knowledge so I hopefully it sticks around but like an example of what this formula would look like it doesn't really render in markdown at all like obviously but if I took this and I went to like I have it just a law tech document open and I can just paste this in I have my live preview going dude to do so you can see like sample variance oh my gosh where to go there it is so like sample variance that's what it would be and then if you wanted to do like the square root of that there you go and that would be the standard deviation actually so that's kind of how I've been treating the the PIM wiki now how to actually get this except wiki set up that I have like with all these different folders and then each one with their index and everything working correctly cuz like on statistics on their index like each of these links you can see that in here it's a relative link it's not linked to all these nested subfolders it's just basically the directory that this index file is in and it will open up those other files so it's each directory is its own encapsulated environment except for my main wiki file which has the the links to the other indexes which has all these folder references so that is something I did have to manually type out but you just do that to the main index files once and you're good because once you get to the index file everything in that directory is relative so how do we create all these different directories so all I needed was of course the Phinn wiki plug-in which is that Benwick event mookee I have a whole section for vim wiki stuff so here's how it is so normally you just have like one line here and you have like the path vim wiki syntax markdown extension MD you just create multiple items of this using the backslash thing I think this is for like a list dictionary type data structure in vim Script I haven't looked too much into vim scripts but I think this is one that's what you could what you what you call this so inside of this array is a bunch of dictionary I had objects and you just have the same stuff I just copied everything and just changed like the path so then each of these paths becomes its own wiki so when I go up to here I'm not Leader WT the leader WS yes WS wiki select wiki search I don't know what it's going to stand for but then it will actually list it out here and it'll take you to the index file for that one so let's go to Python um Tech Python I shouldn't need to make a new one weird Tech Python index hmm I mean it's here so that's weird let's see what does 14 Tech Python yes strange no in any case you could select yours that way and I guess just pop through your wiki's I just keep my top level index file linked to all the other indexes of all the other way keys so I mean I never really it's why I don't even know the hotkey that later WS is because I never use it so I don't really use this way I just like my leader WW take me to my top level wiki and then I have my indexes right here and I can go through them as I please go there and there's all my stuff that's how I like to have my stuff structured anyways and this is just you can ignore this this is just a giant mess right now because I'm just going through the various resources I have collected on my statistics research and then each of these non linked items is just something I need to fill in later I just don't want to forget about it cuz it popped into my head and then eventually when I get a bunch of stuff here I'll have it like all sorted and you know separate it out and it'll make more sense but for now this is just what I have so yeah that is how I have my FEM wiki set up now I do have some templates set up for my specific fan wiki stuff I have a diary template for like my dev vlog I just do leader diary and it does that and then leader now does that date stamp thing so let's look at that later W leaver W leader W okay so if I was gonna be in a in my a brand new open diary file I would type in the name Y I won't even do that because I would have actually I need to create a new file because otherwise that will overwrite my existing one so let's just say I have a brand new diary file so it's it's the next day it's blank file I need to give it a header so in the listed index it has a nice name and I just want to start you know hit the ground running so I can just do leader and then type the word diary at least this is for like my mapped hotkey and template diary and so I have my placeholder so I can just go like this and I use my title I can type out a quote for the day and then my devlog like I'm ready to start typing I could just do leader now there we go and I can start start typing for the day and there's my entries so that it would be that's how I have that set up is just a basic template for these diary files let me do not want that file and then I also have one for like the statistic stuff if I went to a new one I would actually let's just do median median and then I have one I just do leader note so I leader note and it would set up all that stuff for me so this way I'm ready to go type out my explanation I can link to my resources if I have a link I can just do leader L and I would set up a link for me and I'm ready to keep going and then finally I have like code so when I get my at the R code ready I can just start having the R code yeah and then there's my timestamp and then I did find something this is unrelated to vim wiki I did find something cool with our code recently so if I was going to do go to our and then actually now I could just do it this way so say I have an R file open and I have ggplot2 diamonds price so let's just say I have this little snippet of code what this would do is just print out the table column of the price for the diamonds data set and ggplot2 now I have a hot key I haven't really gotten too familiar with this yet but in our files if I do leader T oh yeah leader T maybe it's not working at the moment hmm oh because it's set for our MD my bad I was messing with this earlier which this isn't like my regular expression stuff X X X X X there that should work in which case I will save and quit go back in we should be good now so leader T it is not liking this right now huh well what I have set up and I'm not sure why it's not working at the point at this moment is a split that opens up a terminal and I have a new plug in so it would open up AV and this thing is going crazy it would open up a V split and then in here it would open up a terminal let go R and it would be ready for me to do to type different art code so the plugin I have is right where is it for our analysis here right here send to window so this uses space hjkl for a relative movement but with this I can send code from different from one window to another so in this case I can just do space and then L and it would send it o select it all there we go and then it prints it out so it seems like I'm obviously still learning this setup and getting familiar with it but this it would be really cool to do like an interactive mode of development with R and at least for this console anyways I could go and library color out and then this would make it more more pretty so there we go and it actually print out other things so if I just did Diamonds Patrol oh there was it would actually print out some like prettier type of output for diamonds so in this case you can actually do like analysis in vim now I know I've heard some other people recommend to me nvm R and other stuff it's just if I'm gonna do real our development I actually do prefer our studio one thing I really don't like about my current setup I've tried turning off some plugins and just using the vim pan dock one specially for vim vim pan dock our markdown it's inside the code fences it still just does not do proper syntax highlighting for me and it's just annoying and ultimately I just like the our studio interface I'm so used to it now and I've done my own package development in it it's just something that I'm used to I mean I know the shortcuts I have vim mode turned on in our studio it's fine not everything has to be optimized but if I'm doing pretty much any other type of programming or text processing other than our stuff I'm usually in vim and I don't really use vs code for too much maybe my website but even then I kind of just edit my website now with this so one thing is also really cool about this if you were going to do this with just this plug-in you could also just do plot and it will actually output plots to your image viewer I'm not sure if this is just SX IV which is what I have but it's gonna take a while to calculate all that stuff because it's got a lot of variables I think 53 variables so it will take a hot minute to plot but it will actually do plots and have the images pop up next to your window so this is actually a really cool thing to I was doing some correlation matrix plots or whatever the thing is where has multiple boxes and actually I can just show you currently it's upset there we go so if I go to V R ray test RMD so currently all I need to do for this thing I want to show is right here it'll output a plot pretty perfect in your image viewer so that's a really cool thing you can do in vim - I'm learning all kinds of stuff about vim this week and in general you can never stop learning about them so that's how I do my vim wiki some our stuff terminals a terminal emulator open in our yeah it's it's a terminal within within vim so that's cool but yeah so that's all I have for you vim wiki really starting to get into that and make it make it work for me especially with like the statistics that I can see like when I start new classes and get into new subjects and materials I'm probably gonna make sub wiki's under the academia folder and just keep like all my classes listed out here and just keep wiki's of that stuff great for studying and if I want to do flashcards I have oh honey it's empty right now because I don't really use it at this at this moment but it's not as great as funky or Anki however you pronounce it where it does like spaced repetition and then it will pick the things you fail at or have less familiar with familiarity with and it will replay those more often this one is really just a random like shuffle of flashcards that you can set in a plaintext CSV file that I kind of stole this from a video of somebody and then modified it a little bit but this one is actually all my github if you wanted it but it uses a couple a little bit of shell this is just like testing stuff to make sure the deck the directory and stuff sets up but really this is it is that you find a flash our deck from you know flat the dot file directory and yeah it just shuffles through your answers and it'll tell you the answer and you can just do some flashcards in your terminal as well so all kinds of stuff for studying that's all my github too if you want to do it but this is already a little bit too long in any case vim Wilkie it's awesome I'm gonna use it a lot more and here's another video about it peace