Mac – Vim mappings / plugin for Xcode

emacskeyboardmacvimxcode

I'm a developer who mostly does web stuff in Ruby and C#, and I'd like to start tinkering with iOS and Mac development.

Over the last few month I've been trying to get fluent in one set of key bindings. I chose vi/vim because it just feels right.

I have the awesome ViEmu installed for Visual Studio on Windows which gives me a ton of the vim awesomeness side by side with Visual Studio power toys.

Is there anything like this for Xcode?

I know I could set up MacVim as the default editor but I'm not too interested in this as it means losing all of Xcode's Cocoa awareness.

The other option, of course, would be to go for the lowest common denominator and switch to emacs (as the Cocoa keybindings are based massively on emacs) but let's not think about that for too long.

Best Answer

There are XVim and xVim plugins for Xcode, they are made exactly for this.

You can also use KeyRemap4MacBook for this (from answer on stackoverflow and this blog):

enter image description here

Related Solutions

Mac – Replaced /usr/bin/vim – now I get error messages

This is a known issue. From :help MacVim:

Note: Starting MacVim by creating a symlink to >
    .../MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim with 'ln -s' does not work.

I found a lot of people getting a string of E254 errors from using a symlink. See this ticket on the MacVim issue repository. The solution follows:

    Most likely this is because you have symlinked directly to
    the Vim binary, which Cocoa does not allow.  Please use an
    alias or the mvim shell script instead.

MacVim comes with a startup shell script, mvim. You can alias it to vim if you'd prefer to use it instead of the system vim. If you want to start vim in the terminal rather than as a gui application, set the alias to mvim -v. Add export EDITOR=vim to your ~/.bash_profile to make sure that any terminal applications are using the now-aliased vim. This should cover all your bases.

Mac – How to jump to a topic in vim under Terminal for a French Keyboard

If you don't want to waste your CTRL-L, you can make CTRL-"] key" work like this:

:map CTRL-VCTRL-"] key" <C-]>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Mac – Replaced /usr/bin/vim – now I get error messages

Mac – How to jump to a topic in vim under Terminal for a French Keyboard

Related Question