Hack with graphical Vim plugins

Michael Arthur Bucko
Deckard
Published in
1 min readNov 11, 2016

We’ve just created a platform for writing graphical plugins for Vim.

We love Vim, because it’s great for interacting with code. Now, we add a visual component to the interaction. Not everything needs to be learnt the hard way!

First plugin!

Our first plugin is a completely new way of code navigation. You get to see a sidebar, which gives you contextual code information (while you are coding). Just explore code in Vim to see the results, without searching!

Deckard plugins (left) communicate with Vim (right)

How does it work?

We call it Deckard. It is an Electron app that can display just about any UI side-by-side with Vim. A tiny Vim plugin sends events to Deckard, and the UI pilots Vim (using the dcode protocol). Graphical components in the UI use the Vue.js framework.

Download Deckard

The plugin can be found here: https://github.com/deckardai/vim-deckard

MacOS:

brew cask install deckard

Ubuntu & Debian based:

wget https://www.deckard.ai/download/latest.deb -O Deckard_latest.deb && sudo dpkg -i Deckard_latest.deb

Or download

macOS, Linux (deb)

More on our website.

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