Since the computer labs didn’t have LyX installed, I’m writing my CS essays (one of which is due today…) in Vim. Someone in SH/SC or the CoC or somewhere mentioned a few things which would make it less painful (setting linebreak and nolist, mapping up/down to gk/gj, and so on), and of course, spell checking.

I thought spell checking would be terrible, it would try to ‘correct’ all the markup, and finding dictionaries would be a pain. But as always Vim knows what it’s doing. Only text with no other highlighting is checked, and to get a dictionary you just have to do

:mksp <output file> /usr/share/dict/words.

Put the resultant .spl file in ~/.vim/spell and all is well.

In conclusion: if you think Vim can’t do something, you’re wrong. (Well, except for diagnosing mental disorders.)