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I'm using Firefox. Is there any way to edit the contents of a textbox using vi key bindings, inside the text area (not in a separate window)? For instance, is there a Firefox extension for that?

I know about It's All Text!, which lets you click a button or press a hotkey to open an external editor to edit the contents of a textbox. However, this opens the editor in a separate window, which somehow feels a bit clunky and heavyweight to me. I'd prefer to be able to just edit the text that's inside the textbox, in place, using vi key bindings. Is there any way to do it?

(I also tried the jV extension, but couldn't get it to work at all. I could edit the contents of a textbox, but then the edits were discarded leaving me with an empty textbox (or whatever the initial state of the textbox was).)

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  • Did you search the add-ons site for the keywords vi or vim?
    – romainl
    Jan 4, 2013 at 8:00
  • @romainl, yup! (Good suggestion, though.)
    – D.W.
    Jan 4, 2013 at 18:16
  • Possible duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/75652/… Jan 5, 2013 at 11:49
  • @IngoKarkat, if you look at the answers, you'll find they don't answer my question. All the answers there involve starting up a separate process which opens up an external editor in a separate window. That's one of the things I read before asking this question. (Thanks for linking to that question; I had seen it before, but it's good to have linked for reference.)
    – D.W.
    Jan 5, 2013 at 19:00
  • I'm afraid that [external launches of Vim] is all there is, if the mentioned jV extension doesn't work for you. Jan 6, 2013 at 1:49

3 Answers 3

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Try out the wasavi extension.

(It used to be available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/wasavi/. However, the author stopped publishing on AMO: https://github.com/akahuku/wasavi/issues/106)

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  • Dead link, the wasavi Github README no longer has a link to the Firefox addon store anymore. May 22, 2018 at 18:25
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Check out EmbeddedEditor. It goes all the way (embedding vim itself), rather than just implementing a few vi-like commands, but that should be all the better! :)

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  • This looks fantastic, but unfortunately it is several years out-of-date and not compatible with modern versions of firefox.
    – jayhendren
    Apr 9, 2014 at 20:35
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Pterosaur does exactly what you're looking for. It gives you full vim functionality without leaving your textbox.

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  • No longer maintained for about a year. May 22, 2018 at 18:26

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