Firenvim – Turn the browser into a Neovim client

The security risks aren't worth it for me, which is a shame.

In theory someone could take nvim, compile it into WASM, and make a version that'll work without interacting with any native binaries (at the cost of some performance and nvim functionality, of course). The only big downside is that you'd lose the integration with the nvim config in your home directory, but perhaps some kind of filesystem API can help with that.

I gave firenvim a shot a few times in the past. The pain points for me were competing shortcuts between extensions (e.g. vimium) and too small realestate in most text area prompts where firenvim activated. I believe the messaging then was that you could just copy paste your nvim config over, and firenvim would use it in the browser. While I think that's true, what makes a good config in the terminal is not the same as what makes a good config in small text area prompts on most websites.

EDIT: I remembered another issue. I'm not able to use it at work because my employer doesn't allow extensions that access all data on a website.

This is great for situations where you need to edit code within an app ecosystem that won't let you dev locally.

My use-case is ServiceNow which forces us into their crappy proprietary editor.

But you do need to get good at calibrating which sites get set off by it because as others have said you don't want it going off an every little text prompt you get most likely

I'm a long-time fan of the Wasavi extension for Chrome/Firefox/Opera, which looks quite similar in terms of user experience. Wasavi is a purely javascript implementation of the vim editing experience, so I believe ends up with a simpler executable model vs launching nvim locally & then bridging to it.

It doesn't have 100% compatibility with vim - no vimscript, for example - but it covers more than enough of the basic movement commands & mappings to be entirely productive for me. I don't know if I would write actual pages of code in it, but I gratefully use it to write long queries in the browser.

tridactyl has a similar feature. It let's you break out the edit-pane content into a real vim/gvim editor (default <c-i>). There you have all your vim environment. I use this feature very rarely, e.g. when writing multiple lines in comments and I am in need of the editing power of vim. For simple text input I remain in the browser ui. Getting a vim-editor in all text inputs would be too much for my taste.

GhostText is a similar extension that uses your external text editor, which in some cases (especially for short messages) is a worse UI, but has a huge benefit - you won't lose your precious comment data even if all the browser/extension/editor close/crash (with an editor supporting hot exit)!

But also for larger text messages you don't get constrained by the typically small input text fields

In a dreamy ideal world this, of course, would be the kind of basic functionality that any self-respecting OS would offer - in any text input field in any app.

Another alternative is GhostText, which I like for long-form editing - it syncs your text editor with a field, so you can work in your editor. Supports vim & nvim, Sublime, and a few others.

I used to use a similar extension in Chrome called wasavi, but I got burned once too many times by bugs in extension causing me to lose all of the text I had been writing.

I have to understand something, why would I use a Big Tech gigantic c++ ultra complex software to do what a lean-ish C99+ software independent of Big Tech does?

definitely useful, for me personally, the use case is using it to write on lambda as the obsolescence of the old editor while the new one is still useless for me as the vim emulation is not usable. thanks, mate.

That is awesome! Can't wait to try it.

Does it break things?

edit-server.pl for nvim? Does it work?