DEV Community

Cover image for πŸŽ‰ Introducing Vim Key Bindings in Daily
Saqib Ameen for daily.dev

Posted on

πŸŽ‰ Introducing Vim Key Bindings in Daily

Last year in November, we received this suggestion to introduce Vim like navigation in Daily. Considering the suggestions of the community members, we decided to give it a shot. After a few months of ideating and working, we are stocked to announce that they are now live in the Daily. πŸŽ‰

⌨️ Vim Key Bindings

We have introduced a subset of Vim key bindings in Daily. Below is the list of keybindings and their purpose in Vim.

  • h,j,k,l β€” Navigate between posts (h - left. j - down, k - up, l - right). In insane (list) mode h,l do nothing.
  • b - Bookmark selected post.
  • / - Open and focus the search bar

When a post is focused it has the same effect as hover.

GIF or didn't happen!

Vim Key Bindings in Action

Look carefully at how the focus is being shifted from one post to another and how I bookmark the third post in the first row using the keybindings and finally perform a search without using the mouse.

⚑️ Vim key bindings are available from v2.13.0 onwards. If Daily is not automatically updated, use this guide to update manually.

πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Changing the Focus to Use Key Bindings

The main purpose of the key bindings is to allow the users to use Daily without using leaving their keyboard. Here's how the flow will ideally look like after these key bindings:

  1. Use ctrl+t to open a new tab.
  2. Use tab to shift the focus to Daily.
  3. Use the key bindings to start interacting with the Daily.

πŸŽ– Contributors

Daily is a completely open-source project. If you want, you can go ahead and start contributing.

As mentioned earlier, this idea was also suggested by a member of the Daily community via GitHub issues. Later on, a couple of more members advocated for this feature and a contributor volunteered to build this. πŸ™Œ

We would like to thank everyone who contributed to the idea and especially Lee Hansel Solevilla for actually building this feature. β™₯

⚑️ Wrap Up!

Daily is all about its developer community. If you have any idea/suggestion, feel free to create an issue. We would love to have you on board and help you build the feature. It's a great way to start contributing to the open-source.

πŸ‘‰ For those who don't know about Daily. It's a browser extension that curates the best technical content for you from the web and serves in the new tab. We are helping over 40,000 devs save time every single day and become more productive.

Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for all the updates!

Oldest comments (4)

Collapse
 
stiv_ml profile image
Stiv Marcano

Hey, I think it would be a nice addition to add a link to Daily in your bio, as I had to look a long time before reading the blog where to find it.

Collapse
 
saqibameen profile image
Saqib Ameen

Hey Stiv,

Thank you for stopping by and sharing this suggestion. We'll definitely look into to. However, on every post at Daily, on the right side, you can see Daily badge with the button saying Get Daily now!.

Daily

Collapse
 
sshanzel profile image
Hansel Solevilla

Hoping for more contributuons in the future!!! 😁

Collapse
 
saqibameen profile image
Saqib Ameen

Looking forward to it. πŸ™Œ

Thank you for all of your time!