I gave firenvim a shot a few times in the past. The pain points for me were competing shortcuts between extensions (e.g. vimium) and too small realestate in most text area prompts where firenvim activated. I believe the messaging then was that you could just copy paste your nvim config over, and firenvim would use it in the browser. While I think that's true, what makes a good config in the terminal is not the same as what makes a good config in small text area prompts on most websites.
EDIT: I remembered another issue. I'm not able to use it at work because my employer doesn't allow extensions that access all data on a website.
The extension withExEditor[1] can open the editor of your choice in its own window, optionally with a different editor config file. Your editor writes to a file in /tmp and on each write, the text in the input field or area in your browser is updated with the contents of the file. This is an advantage over Tridactyl, by the way, since in Tridactyl you have to close the editor in order to update the text inside the browser.
While the effort for creating an overlay that's painted on top of the original textbox is well intended, a simpler approach would be to open a fixed size window on a fixed position that the user can configure. This way you could set it to your preference and it would work for all kinds of box sizes.
Or maybe give the option to only fall back to this fixed size, fixed position textbox if the box dimensions are smaller than a predefined size.
Yes, that's why I tried tridactyl instead in the end because I was tired to configure firenvim to look and behave like usefully. It combines vimium and firenvim in just one extension and supports having a vim-like config file in your home directory.
The documentation[1] shows examples of how to wrap configuration code and if then block so that section will only run when being triggered from the browser. You can also use this same technique to make config from your terminal that doesn't fit in the extension not appear.
The security risks aren't worth it for me, which is a shame.
In theory someone could take nvim, compile it into WASM, and make a version that'll work without interacting with any native binaries (at the cost of some performance and nvim functionality, of course). The only big downside is that you'd lose the integration with the nvim config in your home directory, but perhaps some kind of filesystem API can help with that.
This is great for situations where you need to edit code within an app ecosystem that won't let you dev locally.
My use-case is ServiceNow which forces us into their crappy proprietary editor.
But you do need to get good at calibrating which sites get set off by it because as others have said you don't want it going off an every little text prompt you get most likely
tridactyl has a similar feature. It let's you break out the edit-pane content
into a real vim/gvim editor (default <c-i>). There you have all your vim
environment.
I use this feature very rarely, e.g. when writing multiple lines in
comments and I am in need of the editing power of vim. For simple text input I remain in the browser ui. Getting a vim-editor in all text inputs would be too much for my taste.
GhostText is a similar extension that uses your external text editor, which in some cases (especially for short messages) is a worse UI, but has a huge benefit - you won't lose your precious comment data even if all the browser/extension/editor close/crash (with an editor supporting hot exit)!
But also for larger text messages you don't get constrained by the typically small input text fields
In a dreamy ideal world this, of course, would be the kind of basic functionality that any self-respecting OS would offer - in any text input field in any app.
I used to use a similar extension in Chrome called wasavi, but I got burned once too many times by bugs in extension causing me to lose all of the text I had been writing.
I have to understand something, why would I use a Big Tech gigantic c++ ultra complex software to do what a lean-ish C99+ software independent of Big Tech does?
definitely useful, for me personally, the use case is using it to write on lambda as the obsolescence of the old editor while the new one is still useless for me as the vim emulation is not usable. thanks, mate.
Are you saying nvim's vim emulation is insufficient for you? What are you missing?
I've had the same experience with things like vim emulation in vscode but I switched to LazyVim from vim a few months ago and it's been a smooth experience for me.
I think they mean when using the in-browser editor for lambdas in the AWS console. This will let them get actual vim usability instead of an included vim-mode thats not up to snuff.
yea mate, that's correct. when i type things on the new lambda editor then press esc, it actually lost the editor focus not the editing mode to command mode.
I gave firenvim a shot a few times in the past. The pain points for me were competing shortcuts between extensions (e.g. vimium) and too small realestate in most text area prompts where firenvim activated. I believe the messaging then was that you could just copy paste your nvim config over, and firenvim would use it in the browser. While I think that's true, what makes a good config in the terminal is not the same as what makes a good config in small text area prompts on most websites.
EDIT: I remembered another issue. I'm not able to use it at work because my employer doesn't allow extensions that access all data on a website.
The extension withExEditor[1] can open the editor of your choice in its own window, optionally with a different editor config file. Your editor writes to a file in /tmp and on each write, the text in the input field or area in your browser is updated with the contents of the file. This is an advantage over Tridactyl, by the way, since in Tridactyl you have to close the editor in order to update the text inside the browser.
[1]: https://github.com/asamuzaK/withExEditor
While the effort for creating an overlay that's painted on top of the original textbox is well intended, a simpler approach would be to open a fixed size window on a fixed position that the user can configure. This way you could set it to your preference and it would work for all kinds of box sizes.
Or maybe give the option to only fall back to this fixed size, fixed position textbox if the box dimensions are smaller than a predefined size.
Yes, that's why I tried tridactyl instead in the end because I was tired to configure firenvim to look and behave like usefully. It combines vimium and firenvim in just one extension and supports having a vim-like config file in your home directory.
The documentation[1] shows examples of how to wrap configuration code and if then block so that section will only run when being triggered from the browser. You can also use this same technique to make config from your terminal that doesn't fit in the extension not appear.
[1] https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim#building-a-firenvim-sp...
The security risks aren't worth it for me, which is a shame.
In theory someone could take nvim, compile it into WASM, and make a version that'll work without interacting with any native binaries (at the cost of some performance and nvim functionality, of course). The only big downside is that you'd lose the integration with the nvim config in your home directory, but perhaps some kind of filesystem API can help with that.
This is great for situations where you need to edit code within an app ecosystem that won't let you dev locally.
My use-case is ServiceNow which forces us into their crappy proprietary editor.
But you do need to get good at calibrating which sites get set off by it because as others have said you don't want it going off an every little text prompt you get most likely
Oof. I’m sorry.
From someone acquired by ServiceNow… I hope your stock options are worth it
tridactyl has a similar feature. It let's you break out the edit-pane content into a real vim/gvim editor (default <c-i>). There you have all your vim environment. I use this feature very rarely, e.g. when writing multiple lines in comments and I am in need of the editing power of vim. For simple text input I remain in the browser ui. Getting a vim-editor in all text inputs would be too much for my taste.
You might be interested to learn that Tridactyl and Firenvim use the same library to manage getting and setting text across the various JS editors
https://github.com/glacambre/editor-adapter/
You might be interested to learn that this commenter above is the (one of the?) Tridactyl maintainer :)
GhostText is a similar extension that uses your external text editor, which in some cases (especially for short messages) is a worse UI, but has a huge benefit - you won't lose your precious comment data even if all the browser/extension/editor close/crash (with an editor supporting hot exit)!
But also for larger text messages you don't get constrained by the typically small input text fields
In a dreamy ideal world this, of course, would be the kind of basic functionality that any self-respecting OS would offer - in any text input field in any app.
I used to use a similar extension in Chrome called wasavi, but I got burned once too many times by bugs in extension causing me to lose all of the text I had been writing.
That is awesome! Can't wait to try it.
I have to understand something, why would I use a Big Tech gigantic c++ ultra complex software to do what a lean-ish C99+ software independent of Big Tech does?
Does it break things?
edit-server.pl for nvim? Does it work?
definitely useful, for me personally, the use case is using it to write on lambda as the obsolescence of the old editor while the new one is still useless for me as the vim emulation is not usable. thanks, mate.
Are you saying nvim's vim emulation is insufficient for you? What are you missing?
I've had the same experience with things like vim emulation in vscode but I switched to LazyVim from vim a few months ago and it's been a smooth experience for me.
I think they mean when using the in-browser editor for lambdas in the AWS console. This will let them get actual vim usability instead of an included vim-mode thats not up to snuff.
yea mate, that's correct. when i type things on the new lambda editor then press esc, it actually lost the editor focus not the editing mode to command mode.
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