Vim motion support, is it on the roadmap?

[Abdulkader-Safi]

Hi,

I've been trying NeverWrite and genuinely love how fast it is. The Obsidian-like note structure combined with the Zed-inspired editor feel is a great combination.

My one sticking point: vim motions. It's the single reason I haven't been able to make this my primary note-taking app. I've tried moving away from Obsidian multiple times, but I always end up back there solely because of vim keybindings. Once you're used to navigating and editing with vim motions, everything else feels slow.

If NeverWrite added vim motion support, I'd be willing to overlook a lot of missing Obsidian features and switch over completely. The speed is already there, this would close the gap entirely for me.

Is this something being considered or tracked anywhere? Happy to help test if it ever lands.

Best Regards
Safi

[jsgrrchg]

I am SO happy that you like it!!! I worked so hard to make this feel perfect, and thanks for opening up a discussion.

About your topic, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I’m an honest guy and I don’t have an ego about it. I don’t use Vim, so I’m not familiar with the workflow. To implement it properly, I’d need to understand it really well first. That said, if there’s demand, I’ll definitely study it, and of course I’m open to PRs, if you know how to code, I love contributions and learning from everyone. I'm a work in progress myself.

Also, this app was made for the non coders, the researches, scientist, teachers, you name them, so I tried to keep things simple, that's why I haven't explored all of those fancy features we power users love, and we can absolutly do them all!!!. If this gets implemented it needs to be optional and very well integrated in the Settings UI so my dear non technical users don't get confused with our coder's habits.

Just for you to know, I have another project with an even better performance and architecture (i avoided every single mistake a made with this one), but for us coders, with all of the goodies from this one, plus excellent git support and a lovely Monaco editor (I am so impressed about how fast is Monaco outside Vs code, is unbelievable). It has an even better architecture than Zed Editor implementation for agentic engeenering -just for agents, Zed has a better architecture for everything else-. Over there my friend, we can go crazy, but here we need to take care of the normies. I will release that one probably next week.

Happy to hear if there are other users wanting the VIM experience, I will learn it so that I can see what is this VIM thing that I've been missing haha,

Best,

José

[Abdulkader-Safi]

Hey José, no need to be embarrassed at all, plenty of developers don't use Vim, and honestly a lot of non-developers do. It's not really a "coder thing" so much as a muscle memory thing once you're used to keeping your hands on the keyboard, reaching for the arrows or the mouse just breaks flow.

I'm not great with Rust but I'd love to try contributing this weekend. We can start simple: basic movement, insert mode and visual mode toggle, nothing fancy. Once that's solid we can layer on more from there. A settings toggle to keep it off by default sounds perfect, no reason to surprise anyone who isn't looking for it.

Looking forward to digging in. I'll open something up and we can go from there.

[jsgrrchg]

I love it. Please move ahead, let’s make this app ready for power users.

I’m currently learning Vim in Zed because of this discussion, and I have to say, it has a learning curve, but I can already see the muscle memory potential.

[Abdulkader-Safi]

Done, starting on it now. Fair warning before you go further: once you learn it, you'll hate every app that doesn't have it. Don't say I didn't tell you.

[jsgrrchg]

I'm getting the hand of it, Zed has a great implementation, really liking it. Also I forgot to tell you, what do you think is best for VIM? to be activated per vault or as a global setting? There are currently global settings and per vault, I forgot to tell you that 😅. Also thank you, looking foward to your PR, and just for you to know, I have a little mess with PR's, I'll try to get them all into main st today so that you can have a clean branch to work because im fixing a lot of things behind, but nothing related to what you need to touch, but just so that you keep an eye on those.

[jsgrrchg]

All PRs merged.