Comment by kristiandupont
1 year ago
Over the summer I got an interest in Kakoune and Helix and discovered a number of extensions for VSCode that enable modal editing(1), but not VIM-style per default. I got excited about this and ended up writing my own extension instead.
At this point, it supports most of the VIM subset that I care about, and I have added a number of new motions and modes that do clever things based on the AST. I am kicking myself for not doing this sooner and I think I need to write up a blog post about it. It's surprisingly easy.
1. e.g. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DCsunset...
That's very interesting. Very cool to look at the source and see how simple it is. I may have just answered my own question, but I'm curious why you prefer this over the popular vim or neovim extensions, which have quite good coverage of vim features, and the neovim one even lets you use real neovim plugins because it is powered by a real neovim instance.
I was using the other vim extension for years. I had tried the neovim one as well a few years ago and I ran into so many bugs that I switched back after 1/2 day. I am sure it's better today, but I can see that there is still an open issue with folding, for instance.
The thing is that I used to consider headless Neovim to be the ultimate solution to "vim but with IDE conveniences" but I am no longer so sure. Keeping everything in sync between the two editors just seems like a task that's doomed to fail in many small paper-cut like ways. What I am doing now is much more like adding a few things on top but leaving VSCode in charge, letting it do its thing the way it was designed to.
Cool, thanks for the answer. Simplicity and predictability can definitely beat long feature lists.