vibreoffice

Note from fedorov-ao: I have updated this awesome plugin a bit. It is pretty much usable, but still needs much cleanup. Refer to src/vibreoffice.vbs comments for further details.

vibreoffice is an extension for Libreoffice and OpenOffice that brings some of your favorite key bindings from vi/vim to your favorite office suite. It is obviously not meant to be feature-complete, but hopefully will be useful to both vi/vim neophytes and experts alike.

Installation/Usage

The easiest way to install is to download the latest extension file and open it with LibreOffice/OpenOffice.

To enable vibreoffice for current window, select Tools -> Add-Ons -> vibreoffice - start; to disable - vibreoffice - stop; to toggle - vibreoffice - toggle or press Shift-ESC.

If you really want to, you can build the .oxt file yourself by running

# replace 0.0.0 with your desired version number
VIBREOFFICE_VERSION="0.0.0" make extension

This will simply build the extension file from the template files in extension/template. These template files were auto-generated using Extension Compiler.

Features

vibreoffice currently supports:

• Insert (i, I, a, A, o, O), Visual (v), Normal modes
• Movement keys: hjkl, w, W, b, B, e, $, ^, {}, (), C-d, C-u
  • Search movement: f, F, t, T
• Number modifiers: e.g. 5w, 4fa
• Replace: r
• Deletion: x, d, c, s, D, C, S, dd, cc
  • Plus movement and number modifiers: e.g. 5dw, c3j, 2dfe
  • Delete a/inner block: e.g. di(, da{, ci[, ci", ca', dit
• Undo/redo: u, C-r
• Copy/paste: y, p, P (using system clipboard, not vim-like registers)

Known differences/issues

If you are familiar with vi/vim, then vibreoffice should give very few surprises. However, there are some differences, primarily due to word processor-text editor differences or limitations of the LibreOffice API and/or my patience.

• Currently, I am using LibreOffice's built-in word/sentence movement which differs from vi's. It's sort of broken now but I plan to fix it eventually.
• The concept of lines in a text editor is not quite analogous to that of a word processor. I made my best effort to incorporate the line analogy while keeping the spirit of word processing.
  • Unlike vi/vim, movement keys will wrap to the next line
  • Due to line wrapping, you may find your cursor move up/down a line for commands that would otherwise leave you in the same position (such as dd)
• vibreoffice does not have contextual awareness. What I mean by that is that it does not keep track of which parentheses/braces match. Hence, you may have unexpected behavior (using commands such as di() if your document has syntatically uneven parentheses/braces or nesting of such symbols. I don't intend to fix this for now, as I don't believe this is a critical feature for word processing.
• Using d, c (or any of their variants) will temporarily bring you into Visual mode. This is intentional and should not have any noticeable effects.

License

vibreoffice is released under the MIT License.