Zola for Note Taking by Bhavani Shankar

14 May, 2025 - Categories: Zola - Tags: blogging, tech stack, Helix, rsync, Vim, GNOME Text Editor, Neovim, Hugo

By Steven Rosenberg

In his post, A simple setup for distraction free writing, Bhavani Shankar goes over his workflow, which includes the Helix text editor (Vim-like but with more batteries included than Neovim) and Zola "for generating websites and taking notes."

I keep trying the hot/new editors of the moment (or of the past 5 years ...), and I've been through Neovim, the GUI version Neovide and now Helix.

Since I rely heavily on macros in my .vimrc, and none of those macros work in the vimrc-like config for Neovim, and I couldn't find any documentation for Helix that mentions macros and how to do them.

I'm guessing that the Neovim community is encouraging the configuration based on Lua rather than Vimscript, which is fine except that I don't know how to replicate my .vimrc in either Neovim or Helix.

If I want "distraction-free" writing, I can do that in Vim or the GNOME Text editor (which I'm using now).

And of course I'm in favor of using Zola as a static-site generator, though Hugo would work just as well.

One thing I did to make my publishing workflow more efficient is move a copy of my rsync deploy script into my main Zola directory. That way I can zola build and then run the rsync script without having to change directories at all.

As an aside, making simple scripts is the only way to use rsync. And I almost always prefer rsync to using an FTP client. It's easier and faster.

I could reduce the number of steps even further by writing a script that put the zola build and rsync operations under a single command.