Using Non-Qwerty Keyboard Layouts in NeoVim

Vim users who change their keyboard layout to something like Colemak -- but who have learned vim with a qwerty layout -- are faced with a dilemma: relearn where all the normal-mode commands are or do a whole bunch of remappings?

Personally, I prefer the idea that to delete a line, I give it the middle finger on the home row twice -- even if the letter under that finger is no longer d. And I don't want to do all those remappings by hand -- which seems to be what most other folks end up doing.

So I wrote this little script that programmatically maps everything to where your muscles remember it being. No doubt it has problems -- but I think they'd be easy for you to fix (or to let me know about so I can fix them.

I've tried to make the script fairly "readable," so hopefully if there are problems you can identify them yourself.

Installing

I don't use or understand package managers and I refuse to, so you can't install that way, but your work is fairly simple.

Put remapkb.lua in ~/.config/nvim/lua/ (or whatever the fucked-up windows equivalent is). Open it, and you'll see this at the top of the file:

mykeyboardlayout = [[
1234567890-=
qwfpgjluy;[]\
arstdhneio'
zxcvbkm,./

!@#$%^&*()_+
QWFPGJLUY:{}|
ARSTDHNEIO"
ZXCVBKM<>?
]]

As you'll hopefully notice, that's just every key you can press in a standard Colemak keyboard layout. If you're using Dvorak instead, just replace the contents of that variable with every key, left-to-right, first without shift and then with shift.

After that, put this in your init.lua file:

require('remapkb')
remapkb()

Obviously, you could also do something like:

vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>k', function()
  require('remapkb')
  remapkb()
end)

Or whatever.

I hope that works for you!