Personal information management is about organizing all your “information” - such as your todo lists, diary entries, your reference material (such as important phone numbers), scratchpad and so on. Putting all of this in one convenient location can be extremely handy, and we will explore this using Vim and a few plugins.

I tend to think of a PIM system is best organized as a wiki. A wiki is a quick way to link together various documents which are inter-related but are independent in their own right. Unsurprisingly, the word ‘wiki’ means ‘quick’ in the Hawaiian language. Think of a website - there is a home page, and there are related pages to which you see links, and each page will have its own content but can also inter-link to other pages. Isn’t this an easy way of organizing websites? What if you could do the same for your own personal information? See this on some great examples on what you can do.

But does this really require a specialized Wiki software? What if you could do the same in just plain text files using Vim? Let’s dive in.

Installing Viki

We’re going to install Viki and its related plugins:

  1. Download multvals.vim and store as $vimfiles/plugin/multvals.vim.
  2. Download and unzip this file to $vimfiles.
  1. Open the GUI version of Vim
  3. :set filetype=viki

  4. Type the following text:

  5. :w

  6. Position your cursor on the above text and press ctrl+enter, or alternatively press \vf.
  7. You should see a web browser open up with the above website page open.

The idea is that you can use plain text files to hold all your thinking together and you can ctrl+enter your way into everything else.

Now, notice that we had to type the square brackets in pairs above to identify the target of the link and the words that describe the link. This is basically the syntax of the markup language which we will explore next.

Markup language

The Viki syntax page (that you just opened in your web browser) explains how to write the text to allow Viki to syntax highlight portions of your text as well as how to do the linking between ‘wiki pages’ and even write Viki-specific comments.

Learning the basics of the syntax highlighting is useful because you can visually see the parts of your text file. For example, use to make it a header, and then use dashes to create a list:

Writing CamelCase can create a wiki link in Viki, but I personally dislike this. I prefer that only explicit links like [[CamelCase]] be allowed to avoid situations where I have genuinely used a name which uses camel case but I don’t want it to be a link (for example, the word “JavaScript”). To disable camel-case syntax, put let g:vikiNameTypes = "sSeuix" in your ~/.vimrc file.

Getting Things Done

One of the major reasons for creating this ‘viki’ for myself is to maintain a ‘Getting Things Done’ system.

is a system devised by David Allen to help manage your ‘stuff’ - which could mean anything from your career plans to the list of chores you have to do today.

“Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up - not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time.”

The GTD system basically consists of organizing your information into certain pages/folders:

  1. Collection Basket
  2. Next Actions
  3. Calendar
  4. Someday/Maybe
  5. Reference Material
  6. Waiting For

I created a viki to match this system by using the following method:

  1. First, create a StartPage which is literally the start page to your personal organization system (hereby referred to as simply “your viki”).

  2. Then, create a list of main sections of your viki:

  3. Similarly, go to as much depth as you want, for example creating a [[Reference.Career]] to jot down your career plans, and [[Project.TopSecret]] to gather thoughts on your next project, and so on.

  4. It takes a while to get accustomed to using this system, but once you are comfortable, you can achieve clarity of mind, confidence that you’re taking care of all the factors in your life, and most importantly, a sense of direction in knowing what are the important things in your life.

Notice how we are managing an entire system using just plain text!

We have just explored how Vim can help you in creating a personal information management system for yourself. It’s fascinating how we don’t need a complicated software for such a system, just plain text files and Vim will do.