colemak.vim

This set of remappings adjusts Vim to work with the Colemak keyboard layout.

This project has been superseded by the Neovim version. For now the repo is not going to be archived, as other people than me might still want to use it and ask for changes, but I will not be updating it for myself. Archiving will probably happen some time in the future.

It started out as a copy of Shai Coleman's colemak.vim but quickly changed when I realized that while some of his ideas were interesting, others I didn't like at all.

The colemak.vim file has changed over the years to suit me and my needs/preferences; changes are still introduced from time to time. This means that it most likely isn't suitable for someone who's looking for a "faithful translation of QWERTY Vim", since it's not an attempt to do that.

Main changes

unei (ijkl on QWERTY) replaces hjkl. A lot of movement mappings are centered around this formation of keys:

• ly for word back and forward.
• ^L^Y for WORD back and forward.
• LY for ^ and $.
• NI for end of word back and forward.
• jh for page up and down.

There are other ones in that region of the keyboard, but those are the ones I use the most.

Undo, copy and paste are placed on the z, c and v, resembling the Ctrl+zxcv counterparts in other applications. This is a remnant of Shai's colemak.vim. Back then I didn't feel like making up something which breaks less bindings, these days I'm just too used to it.

There are other changes, but you can look those up in the actual mapping file.

Other stuff

Apart from the file with the mappings a file with unmappings was added. Together, these two files provide you with the commands :ColemakEnable and :ColemakDisable, of which the first one is run automatically when starting Vim.

Also, a word of warning: if you decide to use this, it's likely you'll have to change the mappings for a bunch of your currently installed plugins.