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Show HN: Vimac – Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation

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Re: Show HN: Vimac – Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation

#41
Great job! Always amazing when a single person sees a problem and engineers the hell out of it.

For everyone interested in efficient keyboard usage: You might enjoy KeyCombiner - a web app to organize, learn, and practice keyboard shortcuts.

https://keycombiner.com/

Re: Show HN: Vimac – Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation

#42
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great work! I am just trying it out, but realized it doesn't highlight links/buttons in Firefox. Is that outside the scope of this tool? If so, do you just suggest using Vimac in combination with Vimium?

It actually technically could support Firefox/chrome, but I have disabled it because enabling accessibility on chrome breaks window managers. Also vimium will always be faster than vimac due to how slow the accessibility API is. I would recommend using both for now.

One missing piece worth noting is Vimium doesn't seem to support navigating preferences, bookmarks, etc. in Firefox or anything in the toolbar. Not sure if that is possible solely with the WebExtensions API.

Re: Show HN: Vimac – Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation

#43
post #31

Really want a way to have vi-mode input in all text inputs throughout the OS, hopefully that is a future possibility

You may know this already but emacs keys are supported in all text input areas on Mac. Carl-a (start of text), Carl-e (end of text) Carl-k (cut Text to end of line) Carl-y (yank/paste cut text) and many more.

And the Mac kill ring is separate from the clipboard so that means you can have two things copied at once and insert them with separate keybindings. Unfortunately the kill ring only contains a single element, so has no history.

some other useful ones are C-h/C-d (backwords/forwards delete), C-o (insert line), and the main Emacs movement keys C-n, C-p, C-b, C-f. Remapping Capslock to be a second Control makes using these regularly much more natural. Karabiner is a good app for easily remapping keys on macOS.

Re: Show HN: Vimac – Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation

#44
post #31

Really want a way to have vi-mode input in all text inputs throughout the OS, hopefully that is a future possibility

This is the most promising project I've come across: https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim, although it only applies to the browser. The last time I tried it out it had some performance issues though.

Re: Show HN: Vimac – Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation

#45
post #31

Really want a way to have vi-mode input in all text inputs throughout the OS, hopefully that is a future possibility

You may know this already but emacs keys are supported in all text input areas on Mac. Carl-a (start of text), Carl-e (end of text) Carl-k (cut Text to end of line) Carl-y (yank/paste cut text) and many more.

It's possible to customize these as well, see e.g. https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/%7Ejrus/Site/cocoa-text.html, http://www.deepsky.com/~misaka/MacOSX/DefaultKeyBinding.dict.

Re: Show HN: Vimac – Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation

#48
post #31

Really want a way to have vi-mode input in all text inputs throughout the OS, hopefully that is a future possibility

I made this! It's not perfect but it's most of the way there in terms of Vim motions and operators, and works in any text field. It uses the Accessibility API when available, and then falls back to raw keypresses (like alt + right arrow to simulate `w`, etc).

In the fallback mode, not all motions are available, because we can't read cursor position or text field value without accessibility support.

https://github.com/dbalatero/VimMode.spoon

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