I wrote my dissertation with vim+latex too but I would say it’s not distraction free. The output was beautiful but the writing process was far from easy. I had

I wrote my dissertation with vim+latex too but I would say it’s not distraction free. The output was beautiful but the writing process was far from easy. I had to google tikZ notation and math symbols and error messages to debug issues (including bibtex issues). Word-wrap was a pain (I want to wrap paragraphs) and spelling/grammar checks were painful too (because of mixed prose and math syntax — too many false positives) I think the only people who can write distraction free in plain text are prose writers, where the need for structure is limited. It’s a romantic idea to be able to write a masterpiece on a typewriter. The rest of us who write complex structured docs need a bit more help. I write Markdown in VS Code these days and I need help with tables for example. Markdown has very limited support for anchors links etc. and images so I need plugins for those too. I also use LogSeq and definitely appreciate the plug-in ecosystem there too. I would say don’t romanticize distraction free plain text writing. It’s really only good for the simplest forms of writing.