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by thomastjeffery 3316 days ago
Vi is a poor implementation of a great idea.

I would really like a modal editor in which I could configure the behavior for each key, maybe even define more modes and composable functions.

4 comments

I've seen some work like this with 4coder. Having extensions written with native code that is dynamically linked makes this sort of thing make more sense if you want to minimize lag.

4coder is still very alpha at this point is easy to break but the low level primitives exposed leave it open for easy experimentation with little cruft to peal away first. It also very C++ focused so YMMV.

  :help map.txt
Yes, I am well aware that I could remap everything. It's still not as malleable as I would like.
What exactly is missing? The tinymode, the tinykeymap (and others) plugins emulate some sort of temporary modes.
Rather than map over already-defined keys, it would be nice to have a clean slate to work from.
So, "I want cake! Ok, here is cake. No! I want it to be feed to me also."

Sometimes, you should accept the 80% (or 97% in this case) solution and not pine for 100%. Or, scratch your own itch instead of whining no one else is offering to.

> Or, scratch your own itch instead of whining no one else [who] is offering to.

I'm working on it, but these things take time.

I don't see how it hurts to express my thoughts here. I wasn't asking anyone to do anything, just expressing something that I want, in case it already exists, or there are others who share my desire for it.

So, you want an editor that doesn't do anything when you press a key? I'm not sure if such an app would have many users. :-)
You would define the behavior yourself, or (more likely) load a set of defined behavior.
Emacs? It has a gajillion modes.
Yes, but they all have the same keybindings. I'm really not a fan of C-x everything, or C-[npfb] (especially since b is hard to reach), etc.

In Emacs, it's really hard to create completely different keybindings, because as soon as you enter a new mode, it defines the same original keybindings for new behavior.

I smell an Emacs user!
Emacs has the same problem. The best editor for Emacs is the vim emulation evil-mode.