TRtrapnii·Oct 9, 2023
To be fair, the vi input mode (or modal input modes) in Contour are way more than simply doing `set -o vi` in bash. You cannot compare those two.
The reason why I implemented modal input modes (vi mode) in Contour is, that I noticed Tilix [1] is having vi input modes and people seemed to like it, I wonder if it might be useful to me personally as well, especially since I'm a heavy VIM user, I asked myself if it might make sense to have in a terminal. So let's get it in.
I was surprised how much it became part of my daily live, in fact, there's no need to grab the mouse at all when using Contour. You press Ctrl+Shift+Space (configurable) to enter normal mode and move the cursor just like in vim (way beyond the basic support that Alacritty implemented).
Especially paired with the indicator statusline support, when showing this one permanent
Read the rest
ly (you can also change the color of that statusline), it became one of the first-class features for me on why I like Contour (not just because I am developing it).
Fun things to do (especially when shell integration is enabled):
- `yim`: to yank the text in between two markers (that is your command output)
- `%`: jump to matching bracket, good when having cat'ed a long json file and you want to quickly browse around
- you can also rectangular select like in vim, and then press either p (includes LF) or <S-p> which joins the multiline clipboard text into a single line (removing LF's), that payed off a lot for output like `git status` and wanting to operate on parts of the output (files e.g.)
Have a look at the still young website's documentation here: https://contour-terminal.org/input-modes/#supported-text-obj...
for a more complete look of what you can do with the keyboard (normal mode) :)
[1] https://github.com/thestinger/termite/