# vim and editing pandoc2rfc



... or any other document format for that matter.

I thought it might be nice to have some sort of split window view in that allows you to edit
a Pandoc file on the left and see the generated I-D on the right (in vim, with no extra daemons
and not relying on inotify). 

Turns out you can do that, though it is not optimal, but it works. The jury is still out if this
works well enough to actually make it useful.

In the following example we work on the file `README.mkd` and the output file is `draft.txt`. With
this incantation, we vertical split the window and set one buffer readonly (for the output file `draft.txt`),
For the first buffer we add an autocommand that runs `make` whenever we save the buffer.

    vim -O README.mkd draft.txt -c 'buf 2' -c 'setl readonly' \
    -c 'setl autoread' -c 'buf 1' \
    -c 'au BufWritePost <buffer> make draft.txt'  

For added effect you could run `:windo set scrollbind`, but I didn't find that work particularly well.

The following images show how it looks: first on startup, then we make a change and save the file and
the we see the result.

<a href="/images/2013/start.png">
<img width="900" src="/images/2013/start.png" alt="start vim in vertical split mode"/>
</a>

<a href="images/2013/save.png">
<img width="900" src="/images/2013/save.png" alt="make a change"/>
</a>

<a href="images/2013/result.png">
<img width="900" src="/images/2013/result.png" alt="see the result"/>
</a>