johtela
commented
4 years ago Hi. I'll try to recap your request to check if I understood it correctly. This is going to be a lengthy reply. Sorry for that.
First of all, I gathered that you would like to implement count based commands as described in Kakoune documentation:
Most selection commands also support counts, which are entered before the command itself.
For example, 3W selects 3 consecutive words and 3w select the third word on the right of selection end.
This is an interesting use case, as it requires iteration or looping. ModalEdit currently supports conditional commands, and I have wondered if there was a use case for loop command. Here is one.
I have a suggestion how to implement this. Please comment, if it would meet your needs. There would be three new features added to ModalEdit.
1. Key ranges
The configuration currently allows only mapping a single character to a command. To create a key sequence, you need to define nested mappings. If there was a way to map character range to a command, you could define a mapping for any number key like this:
"0-9": {
<command or nested mapping>
}The range would be an ASCII range, e.g. "a-z" or "0-9". With this feature, you would not have to repeat the mappings for each count command variant.
2. Expose __keySequence variable to JS expressions
Next, we need access to the complete key sequence that was typed to invoke a command. This can be implemented very easily by exposing a module level variable that already exists:
__keySequence: string[]With that you can access the complete key sequence that was pressed to invoke a command.
3. Repeating a command
Last, we need the new looping construct. That could be implemented also easily by adding a new optional property to commands with options:
"<key>": {
"command": "<command>",
"args": { ... } | "{ ... }"
"repeat": "<JS expression that evaluates to number>",
}If the repeat property is missing or does not evaluate to a number, the command would be run once as currently. Otherwise it would be run repeat times.
Example
With these additions, you could implement Kakoune's count commands like this. Assume that you have a mappings w which moves to (or selects) next word:
"w": {
"condition": "__selecting",
"true": "cursorWordStartRightSelect",
"false": "cursorWordStartRight"
}Now you can define command variants that support count using the modaledit.typeNormalKeys command with the new repeat property:
"1-9": {
"W": [
"modaledit.toggleSelection"
{
"command": "modaledit.typeNormalKeys",
"args": {
"keys": "w"
},
"repeat": "Number(__keySequence[0])"
}
],
"w": [
"modaledit.cancelSelection",
{
"command": "modaledit.typeNormalKeys",
"args": {
"keys": "w"
},
"repeat": "Number(__keySequence[0]) - 1"
},
"modaledit.toggleSelection",
{
"command": "modaledit.typeNormalKeys",
"args": {
"keys": "w"
}
}
]
}I like this idea, so I probably implement it anyway 😉, but would that work you?
Creating new extensions based on ModalEdit
I also like the idea that you could extend ModalEdit to create new extensions that implement emulators for Vim, Kakoune, or just provide new key mappings. What you can do right now, of course, is fork the repo and modify the code in whatever way you want.
It would be cool, though, to be able to build these key mappings as extension bundles. I have to test this idea, but I think this could be done by creating a new empty extension and adding just a dependency to ModalEdit in package.json:
"extensionDependencies": [
"johtela.vscode-modaledit"
]This setting will cause VSCode to automatically install ModalEdit along with your own extension. You can of course add any other extensions as dependency too, for example to provide additional commands.
The API to ModalEdit is actually the modaledit.keybindings section in the settings.json. You should be able to programmatically add keybindings in your extension's activation event (something) like this:
let newMappings = {
"d": "deleteRight",
"f": [
"deleteRight",
"modaledit.enterInsert"
],
...
}
export function activate(context: vscode.ExtensionContext) {
vscode.workspace.getConfiguration("modaledit").update("keybindings", newMappings,
vscode.ConfigurationTarget.Global)
...
}This should add your own keybindings to ModalEdit when your extension is loaded.
I haven't tested this code in practice, but I will do that. If it is viable approach, I can write a tutorial on how to write new extensions on top of ModalEdit. The added benefit of writing a new extension is that you can also define new standard VSCode key bindings in the package.json, so your extension can also remap Ctrl-<key> and Alt-<key> commands.
Hope this was roughly what you were asking for. If not, please elaborate on what you need.
ktnyt
Hello, I stumbled across this extension while looking for an alternative for the Dance extension (a Kakoune-like keybinding extension). Dance is mostly good, but tinkers with some configurations under the hood and seems to have some related bugs lurking within. I can replicate most of the Kakoune behavior using ModalEdit excluding the "count" mechanism which is an essential part of the Kakoune UX. I can add this functionality this by writing an extension myself and then calling the extension commands from the ModalEdit keymaps, but would prefer to be able to also configure the keymaps solely from within the extension. Would adding an exported API for editing keymaps programmatically be feasible? If so, I would be happy to contribute if necessary.