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Show HN: Vim for Google Docs

2 pointsby ViktorBash11 months ago
Hey HN, I’ve been working on a chrome extension the past few months that lets you use Vim keybindings in Google Docs. I’m in college and use Docs for note taking, so I initially started working on this as a toy project. When I realized other people were interested I started putting in more work to polish the extension.<p>After a lot of development (and a lot more to come as well), I think the extension is genuinely a huge productivity boost. I’ve made it customizable, so you can remap keys, including even the regular Google Docs shortcuts.<p>I think I may make a write-up about the technical details, because this project was surprisingly hard to build. Thanks to Google’s proprietary rendering and editing engine, there is only one &lt;canvas&gt; element that stores the whole Google Doc. Unfortunately, the &lt;canvas&gt; doesn’t even store the actual text in your document [1]. This effectively means that there’s no easy way to parse HTML, which led me down a painful path of implementing Vim keybindings via simulating user key presses.<p>If you end up trying it out, let me know what you think, thanks -Viktor<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27129858">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27129858</a>

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