Win-Vind: Become an instant ninja in operating Windows at the speed of thought | Hacker News Reader

Win-Vind: Become an instant ninja in operating Windows at the speed of thought

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163 pointsphilonoist35 comments

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I opened the link just to try and understand the title.

If you came to the comments looking for the same thing, I'd summaries as:

Vim key bindings for Windows navigation

Yeah, the title made me think it is about a neural interface like Emotiv

As a Linux user, I'm kind of jealous of

1) Easymotion navigation in any GUI

2) seemingly vim emulation in arbitrary input fields?

Does something like this exist on Linux?

Tiling window managers will generally give you re-bindable keys for any and all window navigation. In fact, for the emacs folk, there's already stumpwm, in which your window manager is configured and controlled from a running emacs instance.

Arbitrary text field input, not so much. Sounds like a project :)

I think you mean exwm, which is the window manager that runs in emacs. StumpWM is written in Common Lisp and is stand-alone, although folks often interact with it via emacs.

Ack, you're right!

I do use a tiling WM (i3). I was specifically referring to the easymotion[0]-like navigation shown in the video.

What annoys me most about windows is, that you have to resort to using the mouse for many things, and selecting things using something like easymotion seems powerful.

[0] https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion

A lot of applications are using readline [1] as the backend for their text input or a readline like implementation. readline can/should provide emacs and vi-like controls.

[1] https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/readline.3.html

at first I was jealous of the GUI navigation, but then I realized I don't use any GUIs other than firefox, for which there are plenty of plugins.

The Vim emulation is pretty cool, the closest alternative I can think of is https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim, but I disabled it a while ago for being kind of clunky

Easymotion, is it something like https://i.imgur.com/P10pNMI.png?

I do want something like this for my tiling window manager. I think cwm comes closest to this as you can search for window titles and groups (?), and it handles prefixes/does auto-completion.

The real killer feature for this is probably that it makes every textbox a little vim instance. Thanks to things like slack, discord, gmail, HN et al, I spend more time typing into OS default textboxes than I do managing windows, or some days even typing into emacs, and it'd be really nice if I could get all my fancy features in all of those input lines and browser textboxes. There used to be a way to do this on linux, but it'd bit-rotted last time I checked and I doubt there's been any progress on it for wayland.

Love to see this windows project! If anyone wants some MacOS Vim functionality everywhere, I have a small library I maintain for that: https://github.com/dbalatero/VimMode.spoon

Interesting project! have you noticed any downsides to this? edge cases where it doesn't work correctly?

This is awesome. Vimium has been such a productivity boost that I actually dreaded leaving the browser. Now I can get that everywhere!

I Can only recommend it. I am forced to use windows for work. I used it daily for the last year and it's so much better than Powertoy FancyZones .Plus vim muscle memory everywhere, regardless whether i'm in wsl, tmux, vim or windows.

Another less capable option is the cool Vim autohotkey script. https://github.com/rcmdnk/vim_ahk

Can someone explain what this does, for audiences unfamiliar with Vim?

It's said about Vim that it lets you edit text "at the speed of thought", because navigating documents, making edits and running commands are all available within the interface via a small set of keyboard commands. There are browser extensions that enable a similar interface within a browser: Vim navigation keys, a command mode for e.g. bookmarking or searching, every link being clickable with the keyboard. This provides the same interface for Windows.