Simple vim key movements to make writing a delight

[ryanyogan]

A little vim toggle for people who think in modal editing. The diamond next to Save turns it on, and the choice sticks across launches. Off by default, so nothing changes for anyone who never touches it.

Summary

• NORMAL, INSERT, VISUAL, and V-LINE, signalled by a block cursor and a small mode label in the footer
• The prose subset of vim: motions with counts (h j k l w b e 0 ^ $ gg G { } ( ) f t ; ,), operators d c y with motions and text objects (iw, ip, i", i(), the usual shorthands (x D C Y s S J ~ r p P), dot repeat, and undo on the editor's own stack
• An ex command line for :w, :q, :wq, :q!, and :{line}. / opens the existing search bar; n and N walk the matches
• Prose-first choices: j and k move by display line so wrapped paragraphs read the way they scroll, words include apostrophes so contractions travel whole, and the clipboard doubles as the register so yy here pastes cleanly anywhere
• The grammar lives in src/VimEngine.js as a stateless library in the mold of EditorMutations.js, with per-window state on a small QtObject in Main.qml. The backend gains a persisted vimMode setting and a replaceRange that groups compound edits into one undo step

I realized after I pushed up what I have been using locally; there is a different vim PR #7: there are some differentials between this; a visible footer toggle instead of a shortcut, display-line j/k for soft-wrapped prose, and text objects. Happy to consolidate if one approach suits the app better (if this is wanted at all).

Validation

• ./bin/build
• ./bin/test: 15 tests passed. The vim harness covers motions, operators, text objects, dot repeat, and edge cases from an adversarial pass checked against real vim: last-line deletes, failed motions keeping the register, oversized counts, emoji stepping, and single-step undo of compound changes

[rodgco]

@ryanyogan — thanks for this, and for the offer to consolidate. I've done that on #7.

Rather than paraphrase your work I merged your commit into that branch, so ef9a3a6 is in its history with you as the author, and the commits that carry ported code credit you as co-author.

What went across:

• The text objects — the biggest thing mine was missing, and the ones I expect to reach for most.
• Sentence motions ( ), and ge / gE.
• Display-line j / k, including the probe loop. I had tried a single positionAt and it drifts in the 140% line spacing; yours is right, and I hadn't worked out why mine was off until I read it. gj / gk became the logical-line pair.
• Surrogate-pair stepping, and the t / ; repeat fix.
• The footer diamond and its icon, unchanged. It is more discoverable than the chord I had, which now sits alongside it.
• setClipboardText, which the registers build on.
• Your test suite's edge cases, which found three real bugs in mine: dw on a line's last word dragging the next line up, dj deleting the current line at the buffer edge, and J adding a second space after a line that already ended in one.

On the register question I went a third way rather than choosing between us. " now names a register: the unnamed one stays internal, so an x never costs you what you copied from a browser, and "+y / "*p reach the clipboard and the primary selection when that is what you meant. Your trailing-newline convention for the linewise flag is kept, since a clipboard has no other way to carry it.

Kept from mine: the host-adapter engine, the ex command language, the edit-block undo grouping, and the hook that skips zero-width Markdown markers so motions don't appear to stall on them.

src/VimEngine.js came out in the last commit, once its tests had moved into the other harness — but the history has your commit, not a retelling of it.

Whether to close this one is yours and the maintainers' call, not mine. Either way, the app is better for #10 existing.

[ryanyogan]

I'll close the PR. Amazing work @rodgco ... very much looking forward to this simple yet speedy editor gaining some vim love :)