Hey HN, I’ve been working on a chrome extension the past few months that lets you use Vim keybindings in Google Docs. I’m in college and use Docs for note taking, so I initially started working on this as a toy project. When I realized other people were interested I started putting in more work to polish the extension.

After a lot of development (and a lot more to come as well), I think the extension is genuinely a huge productivity boost. I’ve made it customizable, so you can remap keys, including even the regular Google Docs shortcuts.

I think I may make a write-up about the technical details, because this project was surprisingly hard to build. Thanks to Google’s proprietary rendering and editing engine, there is only one element that stores the whole Google Doc. Unfortunately, the doesn’t even store the actual text in your document [1]. This effectively means that there’s no easy way to parse HTML, which led me down a painful path of implementing Vim keybindings via simulating user key presses.

If you end up trying it out, let me know what you think, thanks -Viktor

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858

Show HN: Vim for Google Docs
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