Ben Quigley – How Vimmy is Your Vim Mode?

It’s common for online code editors (LeetCode, CoderPad, CodeSignal, etc.) and IDEs to offer “Vim and Emacs modes”, and since I’m most comfortable working with the Vim keybinds, I usually turn them on. When I sat down for a technical interview the other day and attempted to use the Vim features that my hands take for granted, however, I ran into some behaviors I didn’t expect - features misbehaving such as visual-mode find and replace, interactive find and replace, and even jumping from one parenthesis to its partner with %.

I wondered how complete these online “Vim modes” really are, and I took it upon myself to create a rubric and begin to assign scores.

I access the web via up-to-date Firefox with uBlock Origin and PrivacyBadger. From time to time a web site does not work as expected by its designers with this setup. When a Vim feature appeared to “try to work” but was broken in my testing, I noted it as “broken” rather than “missing”, but I didn’t investigate the cause of the failure further.

I fully concede that just because a web site advertises a “Vim mode” doesn’t mean it has promised to ship a fully functional Vim! I’m not trying to roast these sites for not having these features. I’m only exploring what Vim features are and are not present in these editors’ Vim modes, because I am curious.

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