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Comment by kitclen | Hacker News Reader

Just enable vim mode (`set -o vi`) and call it a day.

vi bindings aren't worth running into weird problems imo. it took me less than a minute to hit an incompatibility with fzf.

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/issues/1238

This is it for me. I'd use vi bindings everywhere if I could and it didn't end up breaking other things.

This is actually encouraged by POSIX.

set -o vi: "Allow shell command line editing using the built-in vi editor. Enabling vi mode shall disable any other command line editing mode provided as an implementation extension."

No other mode, specifically emacs mode, is included in the POSIX standard.

Take from this what you will.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

Not surprising.

Back in the heyday of POSIX standardization, the Emacs camp and the POSIX camp were both very opinionated and not entirely aligned. One example is the standard disk block size used in command line utilities such as du and df. RMS made GNU use 1kb instead of the POSIX standard 512 byte size, but this could be overriden by setting the environment variable POSIX_ME_HARDER.

And add search support, if you're using zsh: https://github.com/soheilpro/zsh-vi-search

Every vi mode that I have ever used in any shell allows search with ESC-/ as the vi editor itself allows.

Can I still use macros with 'q<register>'?

Based on 30 seconds of experimentation, no.

You can edit the current prompt in a full vim by pressing ‘v’. On :wq the content of the file will be run as the command. In that case you can use the macros with q (and any fancy vim plugin you might like)

Best of Both worlds: Normal readline shortcuts, and hold control whilst pressing x and e (C-x,C-e) to open that line in $EDITOR (i.e. vim).

Or e.g. Neovim if `FCEDIT=nvim`

shhh, don't tell them there's a superior text editor out there, it's fun watching emacs users consistently do things the hard way

Yes! I never got the hang of the read line short cuts. Only one I remember and regularly use is reverse history search: ctrl-R.

The downside is that while vim mode works nicely on bash, other commands like gdb etc that also use read line aren’t as easy to get into vim mode, if they support it at all…

ime, most programs using readline parse ~/.inputrc.

  set editing-mode vi
  set keymap vi-command

That does the trick for me in python shell, psql, etc.

First thing I do on any fresh unix box is setting above, and echo "set -o vi" >> ~/.bash_profile.

For programs which use libedit, you can also setup vi mode.

    bind -v

Good one! That covers sqlite3, it was my last straggler. :)

Can't remember why but I am pretty the second line is not needed

gdb also uses readline... And readline is configured with ~/.inputrc

Here is my config from a happy gdb vim mode user :

set editing-mode vi

# If set to ‘on’, Readline performs filename matching and completion in a case-insensitive fashion. The default value is ‘off’.

set completion-ignore-case on

# If set to ‘on’, Readline displays possible completions using different colors to indicate their file type. The color definitions are taken from the

set colored-stats on

# Perform partial (common) completion on the first Tab press, only start # cycling full results on the second Tab press (from bash version 5)

set menu-complete-display-prefix on

### MAPPINGS ###

# Allow to refresh the screen

"\C-l":clear-screen

# If there are multiple matches for completion, Tab should cycle through them

TAB:menu-complete

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