Setting up SimpleWriter in Vim

I use xkcd’s simplewriter to make text easy to read. I also use vim to do most of my writing, which means I sometimes take hours copying and pasting between one and the other.

I fixed this by making vim work like SimpleWriter by making a new dictionary.

I first used this wordlist to tell me the one thousand most common words in UK english. I pasted it into vim and used

 :%s/[0-9\.]//g

to take out the numbers and saved it as kilodic.txt. I used

 :mkspell! .vim/kilodic.txt

to make a vim spelling dictionary from it (and saved it as .vim/spell/kilodic.utf-8.spl). I can now use:

:set spelllang=kilodic

and

:set spelllang=en

to put the right mode on and off.

People interested in this work might also be interested in this workthought of a vim mapping problem, or this basic bit of scripting.