You should. It's powerful, fast, and straightforward. However, it's a bit clumsy. Here's a short guide about how to use conventional programming tools in the art of writing. These tools will make your life much easier and in turn speed up your process of writing so you can focus on what is genuinely important. Imagination! By limiting the stress and difficulty of physically writing your posts, and focusing all that energy on creativity, you will see a dramatic improvement in your writing flow.
I use Visual Studio Code for all my day to day programming tasks, so I thought, why not use it for writing? It supports Markdown syntax highlighting, as well as live previewing the final output of the markdown. It even has a spell checking plug-in to help you out.
Here's what writing an average post looks like for me
Jump over to the official page for Visual Studio Code. Right here.
You should be greeted by a page similar to the one below, depending on what operating system your computer is running.
Landing page
Download and install Visual Studio Code for your operating system. This program is only a code editor, not a full-fledged IDE. For you not familiar with programming, in short, a code editor is at its core just the same as notepad, or VIM for you Linux users out there. A simple program where you can write text, in whatever file format you wish. Imagine Visual Studio Code as notepad on steroids. You have at your disposal a large number of extra functionalities that hold your hand in your writing process. They include a file explorer, file search, plug-in manager, etc. But the majority of this is irrelevant for the purpose of this tutorial.
What do we want? Well, only the plug-in manager is of interest to us, because we need a way to spellcheck our writing. Press on the bottom most icon on your left-hand navigation bar. Or if you're fancy, press ctrl+shift+x. This will open up the sidebar for your extensions or as I call them plug-ins. Write code spellcheck in the search bar and you'll see it filter out a number of results. See the first one. It's called Code Spellchecker, very innovative huh? Click on it and press install. The installation shouldn't take long at all. After you've installed it, a prompt will ask you to enable the extension and restart Visual Studio Code. Please do so, as the program needs to be loaded properly. When it starts up again, voilá, you have a fully functioning spell checker in your text editor.
Installing the spellchecker
Here's the pretty bit. The raw markdown you write will instantly be rendered side by side. Meaning you have instant preview of what you are writing as you are writing it. This is a crucial feature for me as it shows the final structure and layout of the article instantly, without me having to scroll around, trying to find my freaking cursor in a spaghetti mess of markdown code and rendered output. To enable the feature you'll first need to create a new file and save it with the .md extension. Now you can open the split window markdown preview, and it's pretty straight forward. There's a tiny button in the top right of the editor, or to be fancy again, just press ctrl+K V. This means, first ctrl+K then only press the V. That's it. You can now write your post on the left, and view your rendered output on the right in real time.
Here's me writing this post
Because it creates isolation. The tool is great, but I use it mostly because it isolates any outside factors that take away from my focus, creativity, and train of thought. As well as giving me a vault to store all my thoughts and ideas. Very little of what I write ends up getting published. All of it goes trough my own screening. This process is significantly simplified with using a code editor as my main tool for writing. I guess I'm just a nerd. Spending lots of time in the editor must have made me get used to the peace and quiet I get in here. Anyhow, I'd suggest you guys try it out. Never hurts to experiment with new things.
Hope you guys and girls had as much fun reading this article as I had writing it!
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It means a lot to me.
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