Athame: Vim for Readline

If you use readline’s Vim mode, then you might be interested in athame. This project is a patch for readline that embeds Vim, so you can use Vim’s full editing capabilities rather than the more limited vi-mode subset that readline provides.

It uses the same author’s Vimbed project, which is used by Pterosaur. Athame works by sending keys to an instance of Vim, which means you can search history using / and ?.

Because one of the advantages of Neovim is embedding, I wondered what a similar Neovim/readline fork would look like. However, it might be possible to approach the problem differently: use a Vim script to communicate with a Neovim :terminal.

If you want to try out vi-mode in your terminal, try set -o vi, type some text, and then press escape to start navigating using Normal mode commands.