Vim/Nvim has powerful ability in editing texts. But if you are in a browser and want to input some text, can we somehow utilize the editing power of Vim? In this post, I would like to share several ways to use Vim or Vim-like editing when you are working inside a browser.

GhostText (★★★)

There is also a browser plugin called GhostText which lets you write in the text area using your favorite editor. It supports several popular editors such as Atom, VS Code and Neovim.

For Neovim, you need to install vim-ghost.

How to use

Open nvim-qt and run :GhostStart to start the server

to start the server Put your cursor in text area in the browser and click the GhostText plugin. A temp file will be opened in nvim-qt.

Start editing the file and the text will be synced to the text ares in your browser in real time.

:bd! will stop the server and delete the buffer.

Shortcomings

Current vim-ghost has no way to customize the extensions of the temp file created, thus limiting its usefulness. The biggest disadvantage is that you need to perform two steps in order to actually start typing texts.

Text Editor Anywhere (★★★☆)

Text Editor Anywhere is a tool to invoke the editors on your system to edit the text areas in your browser. You can add custom file extensions. When you activate this tool, it lets you select the file extension to use and create a temp file of that extension so you can utilize the full power of the various plugins you have installed.

Currently, it is only available on the Windows platform.

Surfingkeys (★★★★)

Surfingkeys is a Chrome plugin which serves the same purpose as Vimium, if you know what that is. Basically, it lets you use your browser mouseless by providing Vim-like key bindings for various operations you may perform inside the browser.

Surfingkeys can open up a Vim editor for various text areas inside the browser. You can activate the editor using Ctrl + i . After you have finished writing, use Ctrl + Enter (in insert mode) or Enter (in normal mode) to write the text.

wasavi (★★★★)

From the doc of wasavi:

wasavi is an extension for Chrome, Opera and Firefox. wasavi transforms TEXTAREA element of any page into a VI editor, so you can edit the text in VI. wasavi supports almost all VI commands and some ex commands.

So you can see that wasavi is pretty powerful.

You can press Ctrl + Enter to activate wasavi when the cursor is focused in a text area. Then you can use almost all your familiar Vim command inside it. To write the text into the text area, use ZZ or :wq as you would probably do in normal Vim.

Firenvim (★★★★★)

Since Neovim support external UIs. This year (2019), another project named firenvim starts to build an external UI in the textarea of web browsers, which is really amazing. So what does that really mean? It means that you can use your favorite Nvim plugins inside the browser without any compromise. It is a true neovim running inside the browser!

Check the firenvim homepage on how to install it for FireFox or Chrome. You can also check here on how to install firenvim on different platforms.

Conclusion

In this post, I introduced several tools to help you input text using Vim-like command or actually using Vim/Nvim. If you work mostly on the Windows platform, Text Editor Anywhere is also a good choice since it can directly invoke the editor installed on your computer. If you work cross platform and want powerful editing ability of Nvim without compromise, then firenvim will definitely be your choice.

2020-01-01: Add description about firenvim.

References