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Is there a way to make vim behave like the app flowstate?
What this app does is forces the user to type continuously without pause for a certain period of time (which is very useful for brainstorming). The moment the user stops typing before the time is up, it deletes everything on the page.
The app is only for Mac OS and there doesn't seem to be an alternative for windows/UNIX systems. Is there any way to implement this kind of functionality into vim?
You can use the CursorHold and CursorHoldI events of autocmd to implement this easily.
This autocmd is sufficient to enable this for the current buffer:
:autocmd CursorHold,CursorHoldI <buffer> %d
This will run the %d command (delete whole buffer) once no key is pressed for the duration of 'updatetime', which defaults to 4 seconds.
If you want to update that to a shorter or longer interval, just set that option (it takes a number of milliseconds.) To erase after 10s of inactivity, for instance:
:setlocal updatetime=10000
Using both CursorHoldI and CursorHold means this works whether you're in insert mode or normal mode. There are some limitations though, it doesn't trigger in Visual mode, when waiting for a command to be typed or in operator-pending mode.
You can also undo the deletion using u, or just paste back from the default buffer... So it's not foolproof (it all depends on what you're trying to accomplish, I guess.) It's probably a good start though, it's pretty simple.
(If you're looking for something more robust and you don't mind depending on Vim 8 or nvim features, you can probably build something better using timer_start().)
:autocmd! to remove auto-commands, for example :autocmd! CursorHold,CursorHoldI <buffer> would remove the autocmd above. (Using :augroup is a more elegant solution for that. See also this chapter of Learn Vimscript the Hard Way for more on effectively using :augroup.)
VimRoom, inspired by writeroom gives the same appearance
http://mikewest.github.io/vimroom/
You could combine that with a pomodoro timer such as https://github.com/carlmjohnson/pomodoro or Tomighty (available for windows) to get a similar effect.
(There are also pomodoro plugins that you can use within VIM.)
