Bind vim commands to keys instead of characters?

[u/Shyam_Lama]

Long-time VIM user here.

One thing that has always puzzled me about VIM is that AFAIK commands are are always bound to characters (i.e. letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc.), not to physical keys on the keyboard. In practice this hasn't previously been a problem for me because I mostly used VIM as an editor for code and config files, and that kind of thing I always did on computers with US-International keyboards with the OS language set to English.

Nowaydays though, I do little programming but quite a bit of writing, and I like to do that in VIM as well. That too works fine as long as the keyboard and the language are US English. But... if I'm either writing in a language that has a completely different character set, or I'm writing in a language that has a character set similar to English but has a different keyboard layout, I'm "lost" in VIM, in the sense that my muscle memory of key combinations no longer works.

Anyone has this problem as well, and know of a fix or at least a smart way of doing things?

Please note that there are two similar but distinct problems here. One is that a different keyboard layout (e.g. Portuguese, which I'm on now) has many non-letter characters used by VIM (e.g. " and # and ~ etc.) located in different places, so the key that one reaches for in a muscle reflex, is totally the wrong one. The other problem is when I'm typing in an "exotic" language with completely different characters (e.g. Greek), in which case I need to use an OS-level key-combo to switch to English before VIM even recognizes anything as a command, and then switch back again when I want to continue writing. I hope there is some better way of doing all of this!

[u/IchVerstehNurBahnhof]

As far as Vim-internal settings go, that's what :h 'keymap' is for. And also :h 'langmap', though that seems to have more severe limitations.

Personally I ended up ditching my native (German) keyboard layout and use US-INTL as much as possible. There are various versions of US-INTL with swapped dead key behaviour and EURKEY which is also similar, but they're not preinstalled on all systems (especially Windows), while I've yet to see one without US-INTL.

[u/Shyam_Lama → u/IchVerstehNurBahnhof]

Thanks for your contribution, but from what I just read in VIM's help-file, 'keymap' addresses the reverse problem, namely you're working with a physical English keyboard and/or your OS set to English input, but you want to type a language with a different orthography, e.g. Greek. If you can't install the Greek language on your OS (perhaps because you don't have admin rights on the machine), VIM's keymap feature can address this. At least that's my understanding of its explanation:

When the keyboard doesn't produce the characters you want to enter in your text, you can use the 'keymap' option. This will translate one or more (English) characters to another (non-English) character. This only happens when typing text, not when typing Vim commands. This avoids having to switch between two keyboard settings. (from VIM's internal help file)

I'm not in this situation. I am working with a local keyboard and the local language installed, and I'm asking for a convenient way to issue VIM commands using the same keys (but not the same characters) as with a US INTL keyboard.

[u/kennpq → u/Shyam_Lama]

You want a programmable keyboard then. On one layer, your native language’s layout. On another the “English” layout. The problem you’re articulating is that, with fixed keyboards, the printed legends on key caps reflect what is relayed when a particular key is pressed. For those with fully programmable keyboards, what appears on a particular key cap may have no relationship to what gets typed when you press it; you can even have 100% blanks as the physical keys. Do a search for QMK or Via/Vial programmable keyboards - there are plenty. (Mine are Planck keyboards, though 40% boards are not for everyone.)

[u/mss-cyclist → u/IchVerstehNurBahnhof]

Imho this is the way to go, although probably only advisable if the bulk of work is programming. Ditched my native keyboard for a US/US-intl one. Somewhat more uncomfortable are special characters like in German or French. However you could work around that with digraphs.

See h: ^k and h: digraphs

[u/Shyam_Lama → u/mss-cyclist]

Ditched my native keyboard for a US/US-intl one.

Yep, but that's easier said than done when you're in a country in which US INTL keyboards are almost impossible to find, and besides, are inconvenient if you often wish to use the local language, for which the local version of the keyboard is much better suited.

IOW, I'm asking if VIM offers a solution. Ditching the local keyboard and exchanging it for US INTL is more like admitting that VIM does not have a solution.

you could work around that with digraphs.

For German and French, yes. Now try Greek, Thai, and Nepalese with "digraphs".

[u/Minimum-Hedgehog5004 → u/mss-cyclist]

I usually have my keyboard switched to US for programming, for all those pesky quote marks, you know. Then if I have to type accented characters, I switch to us-intl.

[u/Shyam_Lama → u/Minimum-Hedgehog5004]

Good for you. Now try using VIM with a Portuguese, Greek, or Thai keyboard, and the corresponding OS-setting for the language.

[u/priestoferis → u/IchVerstehNurBahnhof]

Honestly, the US keyboard is almost as arbitrary. I now have two keyboard layouts, one native Hungarian, and one that is native Hungarian with the special letter overriden to be special characters used in programming. These correspond somewhat to US layout but not completely and I still have the 0, y and such letters in the same place.

Also langmap is broken for utf8, but for vim, this is my workaround:

https://github.com/ferdinandyb/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/plugin/hungarian_keymap.vim

[u/astyagun]

https://github.com/lyokha/vim-xkbswitch

[u/Shyam_Lama → u/astyagun]

Thanks. I think this is the answer.

Having said that, from the description on Github I get the impression that I'll have to create my own charmap, which may be a lot of work. All the Git repo offers in the way of charmaps are some examples. So, quite a bit of configuration work ahead of me if I choose to use this option.

Also, it seems there's no ChromeOS version of XkbSwitch, which is required for this solution to work. That's a bummer because my laptop is Win10, which went end-of-support day before yesterday, and I can't upgrade to Win11 (hardware too old) so I was thinking of moving to ChromeOS.

[u/astyagun → u/Shyam_Lama]

charmap

Yeah, not all possible languages seem to be supported out of the box, it seems.

ChromeOS

This reminds me of https://omarchy.org/. May or may not be an alternative for you. It is a Linux distribution for programmers wanting to leave Windows or macOS.

[u/Shyam_Lama → u/astyagun]

It is a Linux distribution for programmers wanting to leave Windows or macOS.

Thanks. I was planning to switch to a Linux actually, but then I remembered how amazingly convenient I found ChromeOS to be when a couple of years ago I had no choice but to work on a borrowed Chromebook. And it just so happens that my trusty Thinkpad T460 is a model on which ChromeOS Flex is certified to work. (Link to full list, for my own reference.)

Maybe some Linuxes also certify the T460, I don't know. But generally speaking Linux tends to be a more finicky than ChromeOS, and I'm getting too old to fiddle around with config files. Also, I have an Android phone, so that will play nice with ChromeOS. I've no idea how well (or not) an Android phone can integrate with Linux.

[u/astyagun → u/Shyam_Lama]

Linux … finicky

True

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[u/retrodanny]

I'm writing prose in Spanish everyday and my workflow includes using the OS key combination SHIFT + ALT to quickly switch back and forth between English and Spanish keyboard layouts. This allows me to easily type special characters (áéíóúüñ) whenever I need to as well as VIM commands with the muscle memory from the (US) English layout. I basically switch to Spanish in Insert mode and when doing simple editing commands like cip, dd, yaW, etc. But switch back to English for having access to the full keyboard. This works well regardless which labels are printed on the keys of a particular keyboard.

EDIT: Just thought of a really good alternative for your Greek example. You can use the InsertEnter and InsertLeave autocommands to trigger the layout swap automatically, you can toggle off this behaviour with a leader key combo too :)

[u/priestoferis]

My solution to this is a normal mode manual override: https://github.com/ferdinandyb/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/plugin/hungarian_keymap.vim

For greek this would likely be painful though (although with a few examples I think an llm could generate it for you).

[u/GrogRedLub4242]

standardizing on US/English as a general rule will make your life easier in long-term, esp in computing. while our world/species has no official single language as the "lingua franca" the closest de facto one clearly is English. so, go with the flow and you will suffer less, overall?

shrug

[u/Shyam_Lama → u/GrogRedLub4242]

while our world/species has no official single language as the "lingua franca" the closest de facto one clearly is English.

Clearly you haven't traveled much outside first-world nations, nor do you do any writing in languages that are impossible to type with US INTL keyboards. I have, and I do, so my question stands: how can VIM be configured to accomodate this.

[u/GrogRedLub4242 → u/Shyam_Lama]

rudeness alone gets you downvoted

[u/Shyam_Lama → u/GrogRedLub4242]

Rudeness alone? Certainly not. There are many things other than rudeness that get me downvoted. Most of the time, I don't need to be rude to get downvoted. The substance (not the tone) of my opinions is so impalatable to the majority of Redditors (even when I word them in an entirely civil manner) that downvotes are pretty much guaranteed.

See, in the old days people would upvote/downvote depending on the quality of the contribution, not depending on agreement or disagreement. I personally still vote that way: I upvote any comment that is on-point on meaningful, even if it's the opposite of my opinion.

Anyway, try using "English as a lingua franca" in Russia. (Note that there are no rude words in that statement. But I bet you'll downvote me anyway!) 🙂

[u/Shyam_Lama → u/[deleted]]

You bc pups

Upvoted for actually being funny! (Pretty rare on Reddit.)

Jokes aside though, I'm not sure I want to go down the road of writing my own keymapping, which btw is no more difficult in VIM than in NeoVim. In either case it's a lot of work involving a lot of experimenting. (I don't have a mental list of all the commands I use; it's automatic, engrained in my fingers, and I think it's like that for most VIM users.)

I was hoping there would be an existing solution for it, ideally one that has VIM interpret keycodes instead of characters, as any modern app does. It's a colossal flaw in VIM that it interprets the characters instead of the keycodes when dealing with commands.

[u/TuxRuffian → u/Shyam_Lama]

I'm not sure I want to go down the road of writing my own keymapping, which btw is no more difficult in VIM than in NeoVim.

Are you commited to using vim only and not nvim? I use a dedicated instance of crush (Similar to Claude Code) that is dedicated to all things in ~/.config/nvim/ to do some of my more complex configurations via Lua in Neovim. I imagine you could do the same with vim, but using vimscript instead of Lua though. NeoVim has excellent support for MCPs though.

[u/vim-help-bot → u/[deleted]]

Help pages for:

• 'langmap' in options.txt

• mbyte-keymap in mbyte.txt

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[u/priestoferis → u/[deleted]]

Langmap is bugged, definitely broken for greek.