templates

Dynamic vim Templates

Vim (or vi in the anceint past) has been my partner in getting things done. Like an rich tool it has lots of features that go untapped or undiscovered. A few days ago I decided I wanted a script within a tempate to help build the “front matter” to my markdown (.md) files.

The front matter looks like this:

+++
author = ""
comments = true
date = "2018-07-15 14:45:19"
draft = false
image = ""
share = true
# slug = 
# tags = [ "tag1", "tag2" ]
title = "vim_scriptable_templates"
+++

The challenge was to have vim write in the date for me in the needed format. And if you use hugo as your static web site generator as I do you may have found that it will silently ignore a new markdown file if the date is not formated correctly. It some testing to discover that but the bottom line is that I needed a way to script it for to avoid mistakes.

Research to me to this tip source: vim embedded scripts