Setting Up a Scholarly Writing Environment with Markdown, VSCodium and pandoc

Since I started to work and play with computers, I’ve come over a lot of writing software. On my C64 I had a software for desktop publishing called GeoPublish and also on my Atari ST.¹ Then came MS Word 6.0 which I used for writing my master’s thesis in philosophy.

After I quit Windows and turned to MacOS, Scrivener was my favorite writing environment for some time. It fostered writing with Markdown and converted texts with LaTeX, a thing I had never heard of. I wanted to know what was going on under the hood and started learning Markdown, LaTeX, pandoc and played with different writing programs and editors. In combination with bash scripting these tools appeared to be a powerful and flexible writing environment that I use today for everything I write on my Manjaro Linux system.

In the latest episode of Shaping Openness I share my current approach to a personal writing environment.

• Open video on YouTube

What do you use for writing?

Links

Here are some links from the video:

VSCodium

• https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/
• https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=shd101wyy.markdown-preview-enhanced
• https://shd101wyy.github.io/markdown-preview-enhanced

pandoc

• https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html
• https://www.zotero.org
• https://lierdakil.github.io/pandoc-crossref

Zotero

• https://www.zotero.org/styles
• https://editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor/

Other

• https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-entr/