[thristian]

I had a brief play around with the example, and pretty quickly came across bugs and unimplemented commands (for example: 'b', 'e' and 'O' are missing, but 'o' acts like 'O'). I like the way the cursor changes colour to hint at the current mode.

However, what I'd really love would be a bookmarklet I could click to Vi-ify every <textarea> on the current page. I've got "It's All Text" set up in Firefox to open <textearea>s in gvim, but it's still clunkier than editing right there in the page.

[tmhedberg]

The Pentadactyl plugin for Firefox (http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/), which is a better-maintained fork of the well-known Vimperator, allows you to hit <C-T> in any textarea or text input to enable Vim-style keybindings inline. <C-I> opens the text for editing in an actual Vim instance, like the plugin you mentioned.

Of course, Pentadactyl changes a lot about how the browser works beyond just text editing, so it may not be for everyone.

[mahcuz]

I can't live without pentadactyl.

[haridsv]

You can use jVi plugin that automatically enables vi bindings on text boxes.

[dredmorbius]

Nice. I swear by Vimperator myself.

[ElbertF]

Bookmarklet:

  javascript:(function(){var d=document;var s=d.createElement('script');var t=d.getElementsByTagName('textarea');s.setAttribute('src','http://webvi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lib/webvi.js);d.body.appendChild(s);for(var i in t){if(typeof t[i]=='object')t[i].setAttribute('class','webvi');}webvi_init();})();

[thristian]

Thanks for that!

I had to make some changes to get it working on my machine:

  javascript:(function() {var d=document;var t=d.getElementsByTagName('textarea');for(var i in t){if(typeof t[i]=='object') t[i].setAttribute('class','webvi');}var s=d.createElement('script');s.async=false;s.setAttribute('src','http://webvi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lib/webvi.js');d.body.appendChild(s);webvi_init();})();

In particular, you missed a ' in the .setAttribute() call, and I had to set .async=false on the script element so that it would load and execute it before trying to call webvi_init().

EDIT: No, that doesn't work either. It runs in Firebug if I paste it into the console and remove the "javascript:" prefix, but it doesn't run as a bookmarklet: it just complains about webvi_init() not being defined, even though the async flag is cleared. :(((

[kree10]

I got it working on Chrome by executing webvi_init() on s.onload():

  javascript:(function(){var d=document;var t=d.getElementsByTagName('textarea');for(var i in t){if(typeof t[i]=='object') t[i].setAttribute('class','webvi');} var s=d.createElement('script');s.setAttribute('src','http://webvi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lib/webvi.js');d.body.appendChild(s);s.onload=function(){webvi_init();};})();

[thristian]

That got it working, thanks!

Then I tried to write a comment in HN using WebVi in the reply box, and after I hit 'Submit', the comment that actually got posted was just 'M' instead of what I (thought I) wrote. Ah well, early days yet. :)

[rix0r]

No kidding. The first thing that I tried immediately wasn't supported (capital 'C' to start typing over the first line).

Would be very nice once it gets more mature, though.

[super_mario]

I use Pentadactyl with Firefox. It allows you to use familiar vim commands to navigate the web completely without mouse. It's really fast way to search for things and lookup information (which I do a lot), but it also supports limited set of VIM commands in text areas, about 60 or so commands. It's useful when you don't want to edit in external VIM process (which you can do as well, this is configured out of the box).

[arnorhs]

+1 on that bookmarklet. Would be very helpful in a lot of cases.