I could not switch away from vim for some kind of meager and broken vim-ish interface. Apparently "vim bindings" just means jklhiI$^0/ support, as if that's in any way able to approach an iota of what makes vim great.
Don't even bother with vim key bindings. I have yet to see even half-hearted support for a decent vim like interface on these new web based editors. The fact of it is that being as powerful as vim requires a decade or two of work more than anyone is willing or able to offer. If these people looking for a new editors all the time are not already using vim I doubt they would have the patience it would take to get it up to vim's speed.
I wholeheartedly agree that there is more to Vim than jkhiI$&0... but berating such a fantastic product is very counter productive.
Instead, think of ways (or contribute ways) to improve the VIM plugins to Code Mirror. Even suggesting which other parts of VIM you find so useful would be of more use than berating them for using VIM plugins instead of VIM itself.
Ignoring OP's harshing, it does seem hopeless. There's little incentive. Probably the easiest way is to compile vim direct to javascript (or java), and ignore/hack the OS integration. Unfortunately, improving the plugin seems to have fundamental limits (see the js for the actual bindings http://codemirror.net/keymap/vim.js - there's a few more than I'd expected):
> Because CodeMirror's internal API is quite different from Vim, they are only a loose approximation of actual vim bindings, though.http://codemirror.net/demo/vim.html
From a theoretical point of view - all text editors offer nearly the same feature set, so all features should be available through a different set of keybindings.
In reality, of course, this can be difficult if the editor doesn't offer reasonable support for accessing all of the keybindings through the API.
Still, CodeMirror does seem to offer better support than most.
Could you switch away from vim for the other features that Light Table might have? Your comment makes me think you didn't read or watch the demo posted earlier. The point of vim bindings would be to make you a bit more at home, nothing more. Same with Emacs bindings.
There are of course serious tradeoffs involved with making Light Table an in-browser or webview based editor, but it's definitely not clear cut. I'm sure you could build Light Table as an Emacs mode, a Vim plugin, or an Eclipse plugin, but then it would be tied up with that platform, and people would have to re-implement it (badly) elsewhere. See the poor Java support outside of the big and bloated IDEs like Eclipse.
Furthermore, before you denigrate web based editors like CodeMirror, consider what a crazy idea they are in the first place, and what it takes to build something as good as CodeMirror: http://codemirror.net/doc/internals.html
Comments
I could not switch away from vim for some kind of meager and broken vim-ish interface. Apparently "vim bindings" just means jklhiI$^0/ support, as if that's in any way able to approach an iota of what makes vim great.
Don't even bother with vim key bindings. I have yet to see even half-hearted support for a decent vim like interface on these new web based editors. The fact of it is that being as powerful as vim requires a decade or two of work more than anyone is willing or able to offer. If these people looking for a new editors all the time are not already using vim I doubt they would have the patience it would take to get it up to vim's speed.
I wholeheartedly agree that there is more to Vim than jkhiI$&0... but berating such a fantastic product is very counter productive.
Instead, think of ways (or contribute ways) to improve the VIM plugins to Code Mirror. Even suggesting which other parts of VIM you find so useful would be of more use than berating them for using VIM plugins instead of VIM itself.
Ignoring OP's harshing, it does seem hopeless. There's little incentive. Probably the easiest way is to compile vim direct to javascript (or java), and ignore/hack the OS integration. Unfortunately, improving the plugin seems to have fundamental limits (see the js for the actual bindings http://codemirror.net/keymap/vim.js - there's a few more than I'd expected):
> Because CodeMirror's internal API is quite different from Vim, they are only a loose approximation of actual vim bindings, though. http://codemirror.net/demo/vim.html
From a theoretical point of view - all text editors offer nearly the same feature set, so all features should be available through a different set of keybindings.
In reality, of course, this can be difficult if the editor doesn't offer reasonable support for accessing all of the keybindings through the API.
Still, CodeMirror does seem to offer better support than most.
Could you switch away from vim for the other features that Light Table might have? Your comment makes me think you didn't read or watch the demo posted earlier. The point of vim bindings would be to make you a bit more at home, nothing more. Same with Emacs bindings.
There are of course serious tradeoffs involved with making Light Table an in-browser or webview based editor, but it's definitely not clear cut. I'm sure you could build Light Table as an Emacs mode, a Vim plugin, or an Eclipse plugin, but then it would be tied up with that platform, and people would have to re-implement it (badly) elsewhere. See the poor Java support outside of the big and bloated IDEs like Eclipse.
Furthermore, before you denigrate web based editors like CodeMirror, consider what a crazy idea they are in the first place, and what it takes to build something as good as CodeMirror: http://codemirror.net/doc/internals.html
If I can't use vim, I'm not "at home". I don't even know the bindings of things I do, they're just muscle memory at this point.
20,000 years from now, if we've survived this far, you'll find Pham Nuwen hacking away at some backdoor program in vim.