Shortcuts in Vim style

Nikita Gusarov

Some while ago I had an interesting discussion concerning the different approaches to workflow organisation and learning. It happened around at the same time, that I’ve discovered the Vimium browser extension. This coincidence lead me to write this blog-post about the workflow organisation and usage of shortcuts in everyday life. To keep the content simple, I’ll start with some general ideas on using shortcuts and then present some advantages of using their Vim-style version.

Workflow organisation and shortcuts

I believe that anyone reading this post uses the shortcuts in his/her daily tasks. Just imagine leaving without the sacred Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V key combinations, it would be a total nightmare! But what’s about something less common?

In the times when visual oriented workflow is nearly omnipresent and more and more applications use pointing devices for interactions, casual users don’t even imagine that there might be some comfortable ways to interact with the machine. What might be more simple than clicking with your mouse or fancy glass touchpad? But there is one sing: the keyboard. Just give a though about why you still use such combinations as Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V if the mouse is so comfortable? The main reason is the time saving and efficiency of such input method:

  • No need to aim the pointing device at multiple targets
  • No need to switch between input devices

Consequently, the more proficient shortcut user may not even need to move the hands away from the keyboard. Using a laptop with trackpad or a keyboard with integrated ultranav device (ex: a trackpoint) makes it even easier to avoid unnecessary movements.

However, there are some drawbacks in using shortcuts:

  1. Different language layouts assume different key mapping, and consequently a different shortcut mapping. For example, using russian layout alongside french one is rather confusing because of the w and z keys placement.

  2. Differences in keyboard design may play their role as well. Switching between full-sized and laptop keyboards may already be difficult, more so when the laptop has a proprietary layout like Apple’s MacBooks or Lenovo’s ThinkPads.

  3. Although some established shortcut conventions exist, there are always some minor differences in default shortcuts between the operation systems and software.

It’s on this point that we switch our attention to Vim

What is Vim?

Because my blog is not oriented at some particular auditory, I believe some of you may never have heard about Vi or Vim (which stands for Vi IMproved). There exist some other forks and reimplementation of Vim like Neovim, for example, but this is not that important. The key idea here is that Vim is tiny, simple and yet very powerful text editor, with a very specific workflow.

Nowadays, a vast majority of software focuses on visual mode functionality and most of the shortcuts must be called by a specific control key (usually Ctrl, Win or Alt). This greatly limits the usability of some patterns, making it impossible to call some of the commands with single hand.

But Vim completely bypasses such limitations through introduction of various modes (command and insert modes, in original Vim text editor). The main idea of proposing several functional modes, among which one may navigate with single-key commands makes it astonishingly handy to use. Consequently, this approach allows to use character keys to input commands and remap some of the inconvenient combinations: for example, remapping directional arrows to h, j, k and l keys. Just imagine, navigation without moving your hand away from printing position! For some more insight into vi editing one may see the ‘Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?’ post.

And what’s about casual users?

I strongly doubt that anyone, who’s use to working with Word and Notepad will switch to using Vim for everyday tasks. So what’s the point of introducing this strange text editing software? Every community attempts to expand its ideas and Vim is not an exception. There exist vim modules introducing vim-style navigation to many software and here is a short list of examples:

Speaking about the non-free software, we may list:

  • Docs-Vim bringing vim-like editing mode to Google docs
  • ViEmu bringing vi-vim for MS Office

Evidently, I’m unable to list every solution for every use-case possible, but there definitely exists one for every software popular enough.