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Level up your VsVim

fuqua.io

33 pointsdevinrader4 comments

Does anyone have experience with Vim modes in non-vim editors, VS or otherwise? I've been considering maybe moving to something with a GUI for a while, but I can't imagine ever abandoning vim-style modal editing for anything other than maybe kakuone-style modal editing. Does the various vim plugins do what you want them to do? How well do they support more advanced Vim features like text objects, marks, mappings and macros? How well do they support Ex-commands like :s// or :g//?

I tried Vim bindings in Atom for about five minutes before the inconsistencies pushed me back to regular Vim (this was back when I started learning).

I switched to emacs/evil-mode a while ago (maybe 7-8 months into using Vim) and I've really enjoyed it. Evil does everything I want (at least that I know I want). There are unsupported features, but not ones I'm familiar with.

Text objects are supported and the ports of commentary and surround have worked great as well. Marks and macros are fully supported.

I much prefer emacs-style remapping, and there is a package, vim-leader, that gives you a nice way to define leader mappings.

I can't speak for :g// (don't really use it and on a phone at the moment so I can't check) but :s// works well.

My overall opinion is that vim-style editing is second to only rolling your own modal editing style (there is an emacs package that lets you do that, I believe) and that emacs as a host editor for that editing is hard to best as well. To be fair, I'm a really big fan of Lisp, so that's also part of the draw for me. Magit is something else to try out as well. In my opinion, it's much better than fugitive.

I'm using VSCodeVim and getting along fairly well. I've been a vim user for several years but am not particularly advanced; macros are probably the only thing I occasionally use that I've run into issues with using vim emulation plugins. (VSCodeVim seemed to handle them fine though).

It is amusing how much muscle memory plays a role; I've gotten used to Ctrl-S for save again and now I go back to real vim and try to do it.

The only way to figure out what the issues will be is probably to try the plugin in question.

I'm one of the developers for VsCodeVim, and many of the prominent vim plugins support most of these. I'll break down what vscodevim supports.

> text objects Yes, cit, ciw, ci), etc. all work

> marks Mostly. We don't have proper support for uppercase marks (across files and persistent), nor some of the less common autogenerated marks ('] for example).

> mappings Works for most common mappings. Stuff like jj to <Esc>, space to <leader>, etc work, but there are definitely bugs in it.

> macros Yes. Missing some stuff like the ability to execute any register as a macro (instead of just text), but otherwise works.

> ex-commands Full support through neovim integration. Technically even supports any plugins through Ex-commands.

I've also been working on a PR for full neovim integration, https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/pull/1897

Many of the other vim plugins also support many of these. VsVim is excellent, for example.

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