Is it possible to have vim key bindings in terminal?

Question

I'm getting used to vim bindings (like pressing w to go to word, dw to delete a word, and such) and it's modes (insert, normal, visual), and, out of curiosity would like to know: is there some kind of implementation of this behaviour of modes and bindings from vim to my terminal?

Have insert mode, normal mode and such...

Solution

It has insert and normal modes (the insert mode is default, and escape for normal mode).

When in vi normal mode, you can launch the full $EDITOR to edit the current line with v (the same can be achieved when bash is in emacs mode with C-x C-e).

In bash: set -o vi You can run it at the command line for just this session or add it to your .bashrc file.

Many programs use readline for input, and you can make any of them use vi-style keybindings by setting up your .inputrc with

set editing-mode vi
set keymap vi

In zsh, if you change your EDITOR environment variable, the shell will match it.

Comments

[Somebody still uses you MS-DOS]

Pretty neat. Do you know if it's possible to have some kind of .vimrc as well, but for this uses? For example, adding different mappings to <ESC>...

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

@Somebody: Not .vimrc since you're still using the shell's built-in editor, but you can configure key bindings in .inputrc for all readline applications (such as bash), in .bashrc for bash specifically, in .zshrc for zsh.

[Shawn J. Goff]

Checkout the bind builtin

[Matthew Hintzen]

Note that on OS X, you'll need to put the put -o vi in ~/.bash_profile instead of ~/.bashrc .

[Matthew Hintzen]

I notice that the cursor appearance doesn't change in the different modes bash w/ vi key bindings. Is there any way to make it do that? It would be nice to have a visual indication of what mode I'm in.

[Renat Zaripov]

^ Why put (and not set), does Mac have it's own version of bash?

[Will]

For a visual indicator you can put set show-mode-in-prompt on, set vi-ins-mode-string "+" and set-cmd-mode-string ":" in your .inputrc file.

[Soap]

@Will That worked, with a few changes. Namely, I added: set show-mode-in-prompt on set vi-ins-mode-string "+" set vi-cmd-mode-string ":"

[LRDPRDX]

How to paste a clipboard in terminal in this case? Neither the <C-v>, <C-S-v> nor vim registers work.

[kevinnls]

you can launch the full $EDITOR to edit the current line with v this doesn't seem to work with zsh. it is entering visual mode. any idea? i am using powerlevel10k theme, but i don't think that could be the reason right?

[FriskySaga]

On WSL, you'll need to restart the terminal to see the changes advised by @Soap take into affect.