Komodo and Vim

Author's Note: We're back with another installment of "From the Archives", the blog show where I declare writing bankruptcy and just post an old, half-finished article that's been sitting in my drafts for years.  This entry is from April 9, 2014.  This was in the midst of my long stint as a Komodo IDE user. 

One of my favorite things about Komodo was that it had pretty good Vim emulation.  I started using that because a few years before I'd spent a lot of time going back and forth between a Windows PC and a Macbook Pro.  The Macbook keyboard had that weird Apple layout going and it routinely messed with me, so I eventually gave up and decided to use Vim-mode because that's the same on both platforms.

Of course, things have changed since then.  I've become a full-time Vim user, and have all the fancy faux-IDE stuff set up.  I actually like it so much that I stopped using PHPStorm for work and switched to doing all my development in Vim.  So this post is no longer relevant to me, but it at least has a few handy links, so enjoy!


I've been a Vim user more or less since I started using Linux.  Mind you, I was never really a hard core Vim user.  I still use the arrow keys, for instance, and manage to get by on maybe a couple dozen keybindings and commands.  I have no clue how Vim's scripting or configuration systems work.  All I know about ctags is that they're a thing that exists.  So really, I'm more of a dabbler.

The other part of this is that I like at least a small amount of IDE in my normal working-day editor.  I kind of like having some sort of "project view" of my files, a code hierarchy viewer, some form of Intellisense, etc.  And while you can get most of the stuff I like in Vim, they're not there out of the box.  And even if you can get them, you can't count on having an obvious graphical way to manipulate them.  Typically, you just have to read the documentation to find out what the key bindings are to trigger everything.

So the upshot of this is that I use Komodo IDE with the Vi emulation setting.  This essentially turns on a Vim emulation mode that makes the editor modal and enables a lot of the standard Vim keybindings as well as a small subset of common commands.  So I get Vim goodness with all the convenience of a full IDE.  I had never really looked closely at just how much of Vim Komodo would emulate, though - I just knew it supported everything I commonly used.

Well, I had some extra time after finishing all my bug fixes the other day, and since really learning Vim has been on my list of things to do for, er, over 10 years, I decided to look up some Vim reference sheets and see how many of the commands and keybindings actually worked in Komodo.  Turns out it was a pretty decent amount.  (Note from the future: I didn't write down the details at the time and don't care enough to catalog now that I no longer use Komodo.  Suffice it do say that Komodo's Vi emulation was actually pretty good.  Maybe not as good as IdeaVim, but pretty good.)

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