I recently read an article about using Vim for writing prose. A lot of the tips there are really cool, but I don’t want or need them for all the types of files I write in. I do, however, use TeX and Markdown frequently, and who knows if I’d ever want another file type. So I didn’t want to create separate ftplugin files for each with duplicated content. Plus, duplication is always bad.

So I figured out how to reference one ftplugin file from another. I created prose.vim with all the stuff I wanted to use in my writing files (e.g., .tex and .markdown). I put that one in the ftplugin directory.

Then I created markdown.vim and tex.vim and added the following line to both of them. This made all the difference

runtime! ftplugin/prose.vim

With that, I load my prose.vim file any time I use markdown or tex files. And any time I want to change the way those act, I can just make changes in one place: prose.vim.

Hope that helps somebody.