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Comment by phreeza | Hacker News Reader

slightly off topic, but I think a thing that is sorely needed is a kind of libvim that provides proper vim functionality, which can then be linke

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A thousand times yes. I'm using Vim keybindings in most of my editors, and every time it is something somebody implemented anew which is kinda like vim, but not really like vim. It would be great to take the complete set of keybindings > actions out of vim, abstract it away, and put it into a library. I looked into the vim code a bit, and it seems that this is a lot of work.

GNU Readline already provides a lot of VI's (so almost VIM) functionality as a library. Maybe that could be used as a starting point? It probably still is a lot of work though.

I once started work on https://github.com/Julian/PyVi which was meant to be this, but other things caught my interest so I abandoned it for a bit. Every once in a while I do a bit more work on it though.

It's a decent idea. I'm sure there might be something else that's further along than I got.

Oh, it is so tempting to port this to Go.

Yes please, and it's a pain to use Vim on Windows.

yes agreed - JetBrains has IdeaVim, but it is so lame compared to the real thing.

How is the speed? Last time I tried it, about 6 months ago, there was a very noticeable lag when switching between modes. I ran into the maintainer of IdeaVim at PyCon and he said it should be better but my trial period expired and I never got a chance to try it again.

They just released an update a week ago that was supposed to have fixed the problem. It does seem better, but I haven't used it for long enough to properly verify that.

Hi, in case you're still interested I've had a chance to try it a bit more. Performance is much, much better, especially on a retina display. And they've even fixed the dot command with autocomplete.

It's still not the greatest vim emulator, but it's much more usable now IMO.

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