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Comment by m0shen | Hacker News Reader

You can have Vi keybindings in many popular editors / IDEs. There are plugins/settings for:

  * Eclipse
  * IntelliJ
  * NetBeans
  * Komodo Edit / IDE
  * Visual Studio

Just FYI.

Your plugins, macros and settings though... it's tough to have those follow you around.

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vi keybindings don't really suffice, though, even when fully implemented (which many tools don't). I don't just want basic text editing functionality, though vim does that extraordinarily well. I want substitution, compilation/quickfix mode, grep, indentation, abbreviations, file modes, highlighting, and a dozen other things that prove hard to enumerate until my fingers automatically use them and they don't work.

It's a good step forward though. For years, I was always torn about IDEs, it's very handy to be able to do so much automatically rather than having to do everything yourself. So much so that the productivity boost is near-required in a modern environment. But.. you don't get to edit in vi. For no particular reason as such, the editing scheme in the IDE is no less arbitrary. The whole kit would be nice, but hey, if it's at least modal and support the normal keyboard functions (around what you'd get if you just ssh:ed into your buddies box to help him with something and ended up editing things with vi, the local version, nothing customized) that's a lot.

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