Links: Personal Blog, GPUL, Vim Introduction
As a Vim user it’s no surprise to find yourself using Vim commands where you shouldn’t, pressing ESC when you should have
pressed Enter, and writhing gibberish like “jjjkkkjkjkj” when you try to scroll on some regular app.
Luckily because Vim has a huge community of mostly developers, you can find tons of plugins and apps that are designed
with Vim keybinds in mind to make our life a little bit easier.
This are all Linux apps, although some of them may be available in other platforms as well.
File manager
If you’re using vim as your main editor you could of course use the built in file manager or just do everything by command
line, but for some tasks you may want something more powerful without giving up on the convenience of having
everything inside the console.
Ranger
Ranger is a console file manager that provides a curses interface with a view o the hierarchy of directories.
It also give you a file preview for text, and optionally images, pdfs and videos.
It not only has all the keybinds that you would expect, but also builds on them and provide some really usefully features
like bulk renaming.
https://ranger.github.io/
Vifm
Vifm provides a similar set of features as Ranger, but I would encourage people to try both to see which one you like
better.
Vifm is a little bit more true to the Vim way of doing things, and it’s even configured with the same syntax.
https://github.com/vifm/vifm
Web browser
Now a days you could live inside a browser, you got ChromeOS as an example.
And given that we are going to spend a lot of time on it, may as well customize it.
Luckily we got lot’s of options to make your browser feel a bit more like Vim. The biggest selling point on this is allowing you
a keyboard driven navigation and using you mouse as less as possible.
Qutebrowser
Qutebrowser is one of the many simplified Vim inspired browsers out there. It has a clean look and a intuitive way of navigating web pages with only your keyboard. It’s also easy to customize and change colors and fonts.
The only drawback is the lack of plugin support, as you won’t be able to use something like UBlockOrigin or fast
translation. It has support for greaseMonkey scripts and some basic adblock integration so if you like a fast and simple
experience you would most likely enjoy it.
https://qutebrowser.org/
if you don’t like the default look, check out it’s Dracula theme https://draculatheme.com/qutebrowser
Plugins for Firefox and Chrome
If you want a more complete browser experience, although this isn’t as easy to customize as something like Qutebrowser.
You can get a lot of the functionalities on your regular browser like Firefox or Chrome.
For Firefox you have Vim Vixen
For Chromium base browsers cVim
This are just a couple of options that I’ve used, but you’ll find a handful more with a quick search.
Zathura pdf viewer
Zathura is a minimal looking document viewer with Vim like keybinds and a keyboard driven interface.
You won’t be able to use it without installing plugins for your desired formats to read.
It supports not only pdf, but also PostScript, DjVu and Comic books.
You’ll find more information on it’s ArchWiki page here.
https://github.com/pwmt/zathura
Command line programs
If you are a Vim user chances are you also enjoy using the terminal for most of your work. This are some of the apps and
modifications I use that integrate well with a Vim workflow.
Calcuse Calendar and todos
Calcurse is a calendar and scheduling application. If you use any todo list management tool or calendar, you know how
useful they can be to keep track of things. Calcurse allow you to have all that inside the terminal, and saves notes on plain
text that you can edit with Vim.
https://calcurse.org/
Vi-mode on bash and zsh
You may not know that you can enable Vi-mode on both the Bash and Zsh shell. this allow you to edit long commands a little easier. If you want to go a farther there are some Zsh plugins that improve this functionality.
For Bash is as easy as adding “set -o vi” to your .bashrc
Zsh isn’t any harder, you just need to add “bindkey -v” to your .zshrc
If you want a better Vi-mode you can check out this plugin: https://github.com/jeffreytse/zsh-vi-mode
Tmux
Tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It allows you to make windows and tabs inside the terminal and handling sessions.
It’s session functionality is great when you’re working on multiple things with Vim, as you can close one session and open
it latter without having to set up everything again. It has a lot more to offer that I wont be able to cover here, but you can
check out it’s wiki https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki
Tmux default keybinds are far from ideal, and nowhere close to Vim-like, but you can set up ones yourself and add plugins
to improve it. You can check out my dotfiles for inspiration.