I've been Googling for a while now. I would like to have iA Writer-like (or a bit like StackExchange) formatting in Vim. Since I love the way it formats my texts, but I'm constantly pressing "w" to skip words because my experience with Vim. I would love to be able to have the same smart formatting in Vim.
I did found a nice Vim plugin for getting Vim to toggle to big and clean font:
https://github.com/honza/writer.vim
But this still does not enable me to use the formatting:
# Header 1
## Header 2
*underline*
**strong**
etc...
Besides all this above, I would not mind to have Vim like shortcuts in my iA writer app if it would not be possible to implement iA formatting in Vim.
Edit: After a while of even more searching, I found out this type of formatting is called Markdown. I am starting to think there isn't really a good way to directly edit a Markdown file in Vim, because Vim is not able to make things display like that? I would really like to be able to use the movement shortcuts in combination of the nice formatting of Markdown and how it is displayed in iA Writer.
Best Answer
As Daniel Andersson says, a syntax file will get you a long way towards what you want. It's still not the same as a WYSIWYG editor, but headings, bold or italic text and code will look different if you have a proper syntax file set up. Note that there are a few competing Markdown plugins. In addition to the one Daniel mentioned, you might try this one or this one.
But in addition, you could try a plugin for Vim like WriteRoom for Vim. The idea is to make Vim visually distraction free. If you add such a plugin, and make (g)Vim as large as possible, you may get even closer to what you want.