Make Word Like Vim

Question

I really like Vim and its keyboard commands, but I need the formatting of Word 2011 (mainly because TextEdit only uses 1.25 in. margins, and I need 1 in.). How can I make Word's text-entry as Vim-like as possible?

Answer 1

If you really just need the 1" margins, follow @tonyk's advice: write in markdown, use pandoc to convert to ODT or RTF and open in Word or LibreOffice. Sure, LibreOffice is bleh, but it isn't bad if you are just using it to tweak final formatting.

Or just use pandoc's markdown2pdf to convert to PDF, and use a custom latex template with \usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry} in the preamble.

If you really want to use Word 2011 but make it feel like vim, you might try Quickcursor. Not sure what happens when things get complex, but should work with simple text.

Answer 2

One option would be to write your documents in Markdown, then use Pandoc to convert it to ODT, which you should be able to open and style in Word 2011.

Answer 3

KeyRemap4MacBook has four different vi "modes" that you can turn on to get some vi bindings in most applications. They each support different bindings (but are all basic compared to a real MacVIM/VIM editor). You can see the different bindings here. I personally use "Ubiquitous VIM Mode" on occasion to get Normal Mode commands like dd, dw, yy, etc.

Also, I haven't personally tried it, but viWord promises the basics using a Word template.

Note that ViEmu (someone listed it in the comments) is not available for the Mac.

Answer 4

The cross references below are also informative:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/586355/vim-for-word-or-something-like-it?answertab=votes#tab-top

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/5s0kxh/word_processor_with_vimlike_shortcuts/