Zed is not a great modal editor, modality is a strapped on afterthought. At least that the impression the vim keybinding give me. IMO the best chance I see for a fast modal editor that works out of the box is Helix.

When did you last try Zed? If it was recently then that hasn’t quite matched my experience, for me vim keybindings work quite well. But I did think the same when I first used Zed over a year ago.

I tried it a couple days ago. Lost me right off with the poor `:e` experience; popup box with no completion, fuzzy-matching, sub-directory support. Vim is a file oriented editor, not a project oriented one, so good file operations are table stakes.

I don’t quite get what Zed’s emulation of :e has to do with being a modal editor. It’s a completely different editor so of course the interface to interact with files is going to be different, but in my experience Zed’s implementation of modality when it comes to its Vim mode is extremely good. Even better than the already excellent NeoVintageous for Sublime Text.

Fair point. I guess the problem is with their (Neo)Vim keybindings, not so much with the modal-editing part. I included it as vim is the most popular modal editor and its keybindings are what are lacking.

Are there any modal editors that are not file-based? Maybe it would be better to say this is a problem with its file-based editor emulation?

Is it now possible to import .vimrc, or otherwise configure e.g. the sequence j k to execute Escape?

You can easily configure jk for escape. I don't know about importing .vimrc

Can you explain how?

From the documentation at https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs/src/vim...

  {
    "context": "Editor && vim_mode == insert",
    "bindings": {
      "j k": "vim::NormalBefore"
    }
  }

No .vimrc importing, but remapping capability is quite comprehensive.

I at least really like that ctrl-w allows switching between panels as well as editors, something VS code doesn’t do (or at least, you can switch to the explorer but not back?) and is a major papercut IMO

Huh? Zed's vim emulator is one of the best I've used in an IDE. Saying it's an afterthought feels disingenuous. I'm pretty sure some of the core zed devs are big vim enthusiasts.

Does Helix fit that bill for you? It's fast, modal and very little config required.

I think there's also a fork if you can't let go of the VIM bindings.

Helix is a non-starter until it has plugins. Which is taking YEARS longer than it should to get implemented.

The fuck-off-if-you-don't-agree-with-me dictator of the project doesn't help either.

Why? Neovim exists.

I don’t want to install 5-10 plugins with a hundreds of config lines just to make it usable. I prefer zed with 0 extensions and vim motions which are built in.

I switched to Helix for the same reason. Though I'm thinking of re-trying with one of the lighter weight pre-configured versions. Astronvim seems like the best one after a bit of weekend research.

LazyVim makes it trivial, actually. I would take nvim/vim over VSCode any day.

Not really, it installs even more plugins. Some of them are unnecessary. Ideally, every time you update or install a plugin, it must be reviewed. I just don't wanna deal with it and trust plugin developers.

I already got bitten by an infected Python library (that used to be legit). I treat plugins the same since they can be used in supply chain attacks.

You have to trust VS Code plugins too, along with trusting MS not using your code to improve their AI suggestions, or doing a sudden rug pull. All three happened if I remember correctly.

You can easily enable/disable plugins in LazyVim, and they are simple Lua Script/VIM scripts easy to review. I don't think VSCode would be that easy.

And even with more plugins, nvim/vim will be much more performant then VSCode.

I don't use VS Code, I'm using Zed with zero plugins or jetbrains IDEs with a vim plugin.

When I need to edit something on a server, I'm using Neovim with default config.