green galoshes

Recently I’ve been playing around with vim as an editor. Since I do most of my writing in a text editor, one of the first functions I found myself looking for was a way to do basic markdown syntax highlighting and formatting. Here’s how I set up my vim environment to do both of that.

Syntax highlighting

PlasticBoy got me most of the way there when it came to syntax highlighting. All I had to do was figure out how it fit into my .vim directory structure, which is a clone of Martin Greffel’s excellent setup. This turned out to be pretty straightforward

• Save the mkd.vim file to ~/.vim/syntax/mkd.vim
• Put the following in ~/.vim/ftplugin/mkd.vim:

  " markdown filetype file
  if exists("did\_load\_filetypes")
   finish
  endif
  augroup markdown
   au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.mkd   setfiletype mkd
  augroup END

• For file type auto detection (i.e. if you want syntax highlighting automatically loaded for files with extensions like .markdown and .mdown), add this to ~/.vim/ftdetect/markdown.vim:

  autocmd BufNewFile,BufReadPost *.mkd,*.markdown,*.mdown set filetype=mkd

Converting a document or selection from Markdown to HTML

Converting markdown to html from inside of vim is nice and easy. In fact, you don’t even need the syntax files installed. You do need the markdown script installed somewhere (say, /usr/local/markdown).

We can take advantage of vim’s command line filtering here, and simply run the markdown command on all or part of the document, right from within vim. To convert the entire document, use the percent sign:

:%!/path/to/markdown --html4tags

If you just want to convert part of a document, say a highlighted visual block, you can just omit the percentage sign:

:!/path/to/markdown --html4tags

Bam! Your document is converted. Neat, huh?