Neovim Tips for mdnotes.nvim

mdnotes tries to integrate with stock Neovim as much as possible, and through trying to create a great note-writing experience in Neovim, I came across some great built-in Neovim features that are defitely useful when taking any kind of notes. I've listed them below, and I'll update this list as I find out more. Contributions are welcome!

The contents here are replicated in :h mdnotes-tips.

Repeating Last Command

Use @: to repeat your last used command, see :h @:.

This one is especially useful if you are executing a toggle command like :Mdn formatting task_list_toggle when you want to quickly execut the command multiple times.

Find and Replace

An easy way to search your entire notes directory without any external tools is vimgrep, see :h vimgrep. It uses the Vim patterns and populates the quickfix list (:h quickfix) which you can then use to execute commands on the results. For example,

:vimgrep /balls/ **

would look for the word balls in all directories, from the current working directory; this is noted by the **. Once the quickfix list is populated, you can browse it with :copen and pressing <CR> on each result would take you to its location. With this list you can use :cdo to execute a command over all of the results. For example, to replace all occurences of the word balls with dict, you would do,

:vimgrep /balls/ **
:cdo s/balls/dict/g

Tags

An obvious use-case for this is with tags, therefore you can use the above example to search for notes with the corresponding tag,

:vimgrep /#politics/ **

Finding Files

The :find command is great for finding files in a directory with a not-so-large number of files. If you use this option, it will automatically look in all subdirectories when called,

vim.opt.path:append{"**"} -- Use :find for all subdirectories

but you can also call it as :find ** and when you press <Tab>, it will autocomplete with the directories.

Indenting

To indent in INSERT mode use :h i_CTRL+T and :h i_CTRL+D and to indent in NORMAL mode use :h << and :h >>. The ones in insert mode are commonly mapped to <TAB> and <S-TAB> since that is a very common mapping in other programs. In mdnotes there are the :h :Mdn-outliner-indent/unindnet commands which provide the same indenting functionality but also execute more outliner-style indenting when using nested lists. This was inspired by applications such as Logseq.