VimAssist is a plugin for Vim that provides a set of commands to assist in the writing of articles in natual language. It is designed to be used in conjunction with the Vim text editor.

The :Ask command is used to ask a question and insert the answer into the document. The answer is generated by OpenAI's GPT-4 model by using information from user's own documents. With proper mapping configuration, the user can use the shortct \a to launch the :Ask command.

The :Updatedocs command is used to update the documents in the knowledge base used by AI. When user executes this command, the plugin will confirm with the user to using the documents in the folder where VIM is launched. User has the option to choose another folder. With proper mapping configuration, the user can use the shortct \u to launch the :Updatedocs command.

The :Showdocs command is used to display all the file names in the knowledge base, which are currently used by AI. With proper mapping configuration, the user can use the shortct \s to launch the :Showdocs command.

NOTE: I use Mac, and all the installation steps are verified on Mac. If you are using Windows or Linux, you may need to modify the installation steps.

You can use brew to install Python3 of specific version. During my installation, I found the MacOS installed Python3.9 by default, but it did not work with VIM. Instead, I need to install Python3.12 to make the whole thing work. Again, this may only be the case for Mac.

brew install [email protected]

On Mac, you can install VIM using Homebrew:

brew install vim

You can check if your vim supports python3 by running the following command in vim:

:echo has('python3')

If the result is 1, then your vim supports python3. If the result is 0, then you need to install a new vim that supports python3.

You can check the linked python3 version by running the following command in OS terminal:

vim --version | grep python3

Follow the instruction on its github page: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug

Excute following commands in your terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/vimassist/start/VimAssist git clone https://github.com/sluosapher/VimAssist.git ~/.vim/pack/vimassist/start/VimAssist

This will install the plugin source code into the folder ~/.vim/pack/vimassist/start/VimAssist, which will be recognized by the plugin manager.

You need to install the needed python packages. IMPORTANT: You must use the correct version pip to install the packages. For exmaple, if you are using Python3.12, you need to use pip3.12 to install the packages.

pip3.12 install -r ~/.vim/pack/vimassist/start/VimAssist/scripts/python_requirements.txt

First, make sure you update the ~/.vimrc as instructed in step 5. Then, add the following lines to the ~/.vimrc file, after the call plug#begin() line, and before the call plug#end() line:

Plug 'vimassist/VimAssist'

Add the following lines to the ~/.vimrc file, after the call plug#end() line:

" map shortcut <leader>a in both normal mode and visual mode to the Ask command of chatdocu plugin  
nnoremap <leader>a :call vimassist#Ask()<CR>  
vnoremap <leader>a :call vimassist#Ask()<CR>  

" map shortcut <leader>u in both normal mode and visual mode to the UpdateDocs function  
nnoremap <leader>u :call vimassist#UpdateDocs()<CR>  
vnoremap <leader>u :call vimassist#UpdateDocs()<CR>  

" map shortcut <leader>s in both normal mode and visual mode to the ShowDocs function  
nnoremap <leader>s :call vimassist#ShowDocs()<CR>  
vnoremap <leader>s :call vimassist#ShowDocs()<CR>  

I have provided a example of the configuration in the file scripts/vimrc.example, which you can use as a reference.

After you save the ~/.vimrc file, you need to restart VIM to make the changes effective.

You need to prepare the OpenAI API key to use the plugin. You can get the API key from the OpenAI website. After you get the API key, you need to save it as an environment variable OPENAI_API_KEY. You can do this by adding the following line to your ~/.bash_profile file:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="your_api_key"

Don't forget to source the ~/.bash_profile file after you make the change:

source ~/.bash_profile

VimAssist provides three commands: :Ask, :Updatedocs, and :Showdocs. You can use the shortcuts \a, \u, and \s to launch the commands, respectively.

The plugin is supposed to work on a knowledge base, which is a folder containing all the documents that you want to use to generate the answer.

The first thing you need to do is to collect all the document files you will need for you writing, and save them into a specific folder. This is folder and its content is the knowledge base.

After you prepared the knowledge base, you can launch the :Updatedocs command (shortcut \u) in vim to tell the plugin to use the documents in the knowledge base. It will basically create an OpenAI assistant, and attach the files in the folder to the assistant.

After you use the :Updatedocs command, you can use the :Ask command (shortcut \a) to ask a question and insert the answer into the document. You can also use the :Showdocs command (shortcut \s) to display all the file names in the knowledge base, which are currently used by AI.

This command allows you to select a part of text (in visual mode) and ask the AI to revise it based on your specific request. You can use the shortcut \r to launch the :Revise command.

Apache License 2.0