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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Nice, what is missing is a way to have vim (or a decent approximation) in every text area, embedded. There are different solutions and extensions but nothing comparable to vim running in the text area box.

While I'm at it, another thing I miss so much is the ability to tell Firefox (or other browsers) that I write in two languages (Italian and English) so it could automagically switch spell correction dictionary auto sensing the language. This problem is common to at least half the people living in Europe.

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This comment made me realize that I've been using emacs commands for textareas in Safari/Firefox without thinking about it. Most of them seem to be there, at least for moving around within the text. Does this just work under OS X?

A lot of them do "just work", and the rest can be made to. See http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.... for the full story, or create a ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict file that contains something like:

  {
      "~d" = "deleteWordForward:";
      "~f" = "moveWordForward:";
      "~b" = "moveWordBackward:";
  }

The "~" means "Meta"; all this does is set up M-d, M-f, M-b to work like they do in Emacs.

I think this works everywhere. Being vim a modal editor is not possible to "hide" vim bindings :)

Nice, what is missing is a way to have vim (or a decent approximation) in every text area, embedded

This sounds like something OS X or another ambitious and slick operating system should provide: the ability to use the text editing engine of your choice in every textarea on your machine.

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