XVim – Xcode plugin for Vim keybindings | Hacker News Reader

XVim – Xcode plugin for Vim keybindings

github.com

43 pointsaustengary6 comments

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I use XVim and I love it, it's decent enough and I would be editing very slowly in Xcode without it.

Things I wish it would have:

1. ge and gE

2. Marks like ``

3. Changelists so I can g; and g,

4. Visual block replace.

5. Something like the surround.vim plugin to surround blocks of text.

The one thing I absolutely love is the keybindings support so I can map something like <leader>f to Open Files (a fuzzy finding tool that comes with Xcode).

Or my favorite, <leader>d to Look up documentation under the cursor. No more option+clicking with your mouse! (Useful for Swift to check what type the compiler has inferred)

Here's a link to my ~/.xvimrc if anyone wants more:

https://github.com/ajh17/dotfiles/blob/master/.xvimrc

This is awesome and probably took considerable work. There is no plugin system for Xcode, which has always bugged me. Why would Apple not make Xcode officially extensible. Xcode plugins make Xcode unstable and break when Xcode is updated.

I love this plugin -- it's not perfect, but it gives me just enough of vim to make XCode pleasant to use.

Any idea how it compares with the commercial ViEmu plugin? I've never tried their Xcode plugin, but years ago I used ViEmu for Visual Studio and found its emulation pretty solid.

And for Visual Studio, there's VsVim: https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim

VsVim is OK, but I don't find it good enough to replace my usual emacs/evil. I did find it useful to define a gdb-like single key debugging mode. This lets me use keys like the space-bar, s, and f keys to step over/into/out of instead of F10, F11, S-F11. I mostly use the following keys:

s StepInto <Space> StepOver f StepOut b ToggleBreakpoint c Start K StopDebugging u (Move up the stack) d (Move down the stack) B BuildSolution C Compile <M-'> GoToNextLocation

I also remapped C-d/C-u to enter/exit this debugging mode, but since I never use VS for editing I mostly just keep the keys remapped to debugging keys.

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