rhymer

Vimmers are poets at heart
But Vimscript is no work of art
We learned it last night
And God, what a fright
But Muses are built by the byte

Inspiration

The idea came from RapPad, which is a very similar web app, but suffers from a severe lack of Vim (our Vim keybindings are necessary to edit text at the speed of thought!) We learned that RapPad uses the Datamuse API, so we proceeded to write a wrapper for it.

What it does

rhymer will suggest rhymes and count syllables in the Vim text editor.

How we built it

rhymer is written in Vimscript and Python. It uses NLTK and Datamuse for counting syllables and generating rhymes, respectively.

Challenges we ran into

Ironically, rhyming was the easy part. The requests Python library makes API calls simple. The difficult part was presenting a menu of rhymes and inserting the user's choice using native Vimscript.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting rhymer to be compatible with the plugin manager vim-plug was a huge morale boost.

What we learned

A tricky language (Vimscript). Thankfully, it makes an even trickier language (English) a little bit easier.

What's next for `rhymer`

The next step is to allow for alternative rhyming schemes. After that, we want to display the syllable counts for each line in the "gutter" in place of line numbers.