Hacker News Reader

Comment by slammers | Hacker News Reader

Hello - one of the team members from VS Code here.

We built this extension sample to show the capabilities of the extension API - https://github.com/alexandrudima/vscode-vim.

We've done some work to improve the API for the extensions. We'd love your feedback. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/3600.

View on HN

The issue with Vim is that the editor has several hundred/thousand idioms and everybody uses a different subset. As an example, most people delete words with `dw` while I usually use `dt<space>` because the t/f motions generalize to subwords. Until you have the majority of your personal subset implemented, vim support in a given editor is "bad".

I've thought about doing a vim implementation for years where motions are expressed as composable functions projecting from text range to text range with commands taking a list of text ranges, mostly because I'd like to whether non-text based motions (e.g. AST based or generalized cursors) would work. I like VSCode and expect to move over to it so I've thought about starting my project but the scope of doing a good implementation is daunting.

Congrats on the 1.0 release, VSCode is a great product.

So essentially, I think vim-mode in atom actually uses NeoVim's headless VIM engine, which is why it's more full featured. But don't quote me on that :)

The ideal VIM mode plugin for VS Code would do the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com