vim-MarkDown-Extras (MDE)

This plugin adds some spice to the bundled vim-markdown, such as:

• Easy toggle italic, bold, strike-through, code text-styles,
• Easy to add/jump/remove/preview links,
• Toggle quoted and code blocks,
• Format with gq and on save,
• Render with pandoc,
• ... and more.

Requirements

Vim 9.1-1270 is required. You must set a <localleader> key and your .vimrc file shall include the following lines:

    filetype indent plugin on
    syntax on

The following is not mandatory, but you want to enable the rendering feature, you need to install pandoc. To automatically open the rendered files, Vim must have the :Open command.

Along the same line, to enable the formatting feature, you need to install prettier or any other formatting program of your choice.

Usage

The best way to describe how to operate this plug it's through examples, so let's show some.

Text-styles

Open a markdown file and place the cursor on a word. Hit <localleader>biw to change the text-style inside-the-word to bold (iw is a text-objext). Then, while letting the cursor on the bold text, hit <localleader>d to remove it.

Next, try to do the same with arbitrary text-objects or in Visual mode by replacing b with i for italics, s for strike-through, c for code, etc. For example, you can use <localleader>sa( for strike-through all the text delimited by parenthesis (provided that the cursor is located in a region delimited by parenthesis).

You can also highlight text with <localleader>h. However, the highlight is not persistent. As usual, you can remove the highlight with <localleader>d.

See :h markdown-extras-mappings for all the possible text styles.

Links

Now, place the cursor on a word and hit <enter>. Select Create new link from the popup menu and point to an existing file or just type a new file name. If you created a new file, fill it in with some text and save it. Hit <backspace> to go back to the previous file and place the cursor to the newly created link. Hit K. Then, hit <enter> again to open the link. The link can also be external URL:s, e.g. https://example.com. If the link is a file, then <shift-enter> open it in a vertical split window.

Next, create some new links and use <localleader>n and <localleader>N to locate their position in the current buffer. When on a link text, hit <localleader>d to remove the link.

Although you can hit <enter> to link a word, more generlly you can use <localleader>l plus some motion to create links, like for example <localleader>lfa (note that fa is a motion).

You can also dynamically refer to links while typing. Go in insert mode and type [ to see a list of all available links.

In case you are working on a markdown file with mixed inline and reference-style links, you can convert the former to the latter by using :MDEConvertLinks command. All the newly created links will be placed after the <!-- DO NOT REMOVE vim-markdown-extras references DO NOT REMOVE--> comment line. The reference identifiers are numbers.

Note

The links management only applies to links reported after the <!-- DO NOT REMOVE vim-markdown-extras references DO NOT REMOVE--> comment line. Such a line shall be unique in the buffer.

Lists

You can create lists as in a normal markdown file. However, note that the behavior of the <enter> key is hacked to mimic the behavior of Microsoft products and respect possible nesting. Although there are many reasons to stick with the bundled vim-markdown behavior when it comes to lists, my use-cases and preferences require a different behavior. If you want the standard vim-markdown behavior, then set g:markdown_extras_config['hack_CR'] = false in your .vimrc.

You can create to-do lists as you would do in normal markdown, by starting lines with - [ ] . When in normal mode, you can check/uncheck the item in the to-do list with <localleader>x in normal mode. You can change how check-boxes are rendered by setting the keys empty_checkbox and marked_checkbox of the g:markdown_extras_config dictionary, for example you can set g:markdown_extras_config[marked_checkbox] = 0x2714. The value shall be a valid Unicode point value.

Note

If you have vim-outline installed, then you can use <localleader>o to display the unchecked items of the to-do list in a scratch buffer.

Formatting

You can format text as usual by using gq. Here gq uses prettier, provided that you have it installed. That is, if you use gq plus motion, or if you visually select some text and then hit gq, then prettier will only prettify such a portion of text. You can also prettify the whole buffer on save by setting g:markdown_extras_config['format_on_save'] = true in your .vimrc.

Rendering

You can then use :make to render your buffer with pandoc, provided that you have pandoc installed.

However, sometimes you want to render & open the rendered file at once, and for this reason you have :MDEMake. Try to run call such a command and hit <tab> to see possible targets.

You can pass arguments to pandoc via the key pandoc_args of the g:markdown_extras_config dictionary. You could for example set the following:

  g:markdown_extras_config = {}
  g:markdown_extras_config['pandoc_args'] =
  [$'--css="{$HOME}/dotfiles/my_css_style.css"',
      $'--lua-filter="{$HOME}/dotfiles/emoji-admonitions.lua"']

Note

The rendered file will automatically open if your Vim has the :Open command.

Indices

As the plugin can be used for note-taking, it may be desirable to access different indices in an ergonomic way. This can be achieved with the g:markdown_extras_indices list in combination with the :MDEIndices command. Note that g:markdown_extras_indices is nothing, but a list of files.

For more information about key-bindings, configuration, etc. take a look at :h markdown-extras.

Limitations

Nothing is perfect, and this plugin is no exception. Here are some known limitations:

• Markdown is not a regular language, yet many features rely on regular expressions. This means there will always be edge cases where some features fail. Properly parsing non-regular languages requires more advanced tools like Tree-sitter. However, I personally don't believe it's worth "punishing" all use cases with slower, more memory-hungry solutions just to handle rare edge cases. The choice here is to favor efficiency and speed for the majority, rather than striving for exhaustive coverage.

• The plugin leans toward using reference-style links with numeric identifiers. You can try using strings as identifiers, but I can't guarantee everything will work as expected.

• The link management system depends on a special comment: <!-- DO NOT REMOVE vim-markdown-extras references DO NOT REMOVE --> This comment must be unique and present. Trying to locate links scattered randomly throughout the buffer using regular expressions would likely run into the same problems mentioned in the first point.

License

BSD-3.