Somehow, coming across an IDE called Helix has made me want to explore more Vim again.

I do have Vim enabled in many of the apps that I use, namely:

  1. Vimium in Browsers
  2. Vim Mode in Obsidian (and additional plugin for Vimrc support)
  3. IdeaVim in PyCharm

While I know the basic concepts, I feel like I never quite reached the Vim-thusiast level of grokking Vim.

Not that playing around with vim-surround will necessarily get me there, but it was something I came across while reading the README for IdeaVim. This is a well-known plugin that I’ve played around before and enjoyed, so I figured I’d add it into the ~/.ideavimrc file.

There is just one “gotcha” I wantedt to jot down: In Normal mode, it seems like you need to start with an action followed by lowercase s, e.g. cs, ys, ds, while in Visual mode, it seems like you need to use the uppercase S, otherwise just selecting s will try to replace whatever you have selected in visual mode. 🤷‍♀️

For Obsidian, the Vimrc support plugin has some examples on how to mimic vim-surround-like functionalities, though it is not the same as the plugin. It seems like Vim in general has limited support due to limitations of codemirror-vim. Some other “gotchas” I found was that .obsidian.vimrc loads only after a pane change, so if you have a file that automatically opens and try to use it, it may not work. I also have a Journal plugin, but this uses a different editor and doesn’t read the rules from the .vimrc file as well.

Not sure if this plugin will stay forever but happy to have dabbled into this Vim again. :) (And I’m using Vimium more!)