Keybinding Schemes

[falood]

First and foremost, thank you for the excellent work and continued dedication to Vicinae!

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'm a big fan of the project's experience. As an Emacs user, I've also heard from others in the community who would appreciate having Emacs-style keybindings for navigation and editing.

Describe the solution you'd like

• Introduce a "Keybinding Scheme" option in the settings page. This would preserve the current Default scheme (unchanged) and add a new, optional Emacs scheme.
• Update navigation keys for the Emacs scheme. For list navigation, the Emacs scheme would use Ctrl+N (for down) and Ctrl+P (for up). The Default scheme would remain as-is.
• Add Emacs-style editing keys in the search bar (Emacs mode only). This would include common bindings like:
  • Ctrl+B (backward-char), Ctrl+F (forward-char)
  • Ctrl+A (beginning-of-line), Ctrl+E (end-of-line)
  • Ctrl+K (kill-line), Ctrl+U (kill-whole-line)
  • Alt+B (backward-word), Alt+F (forward-word)
  • Alt+Backspace (backward-kill-word), Alt+Delete (kill-word)
• Note: While this may differ from the philosophy or shortcuts of apps like Raycast, the Default scheme will be completely unaffected. This feature is intended to be strictly opt-in to avoid disrupting existing users.

Known or Potential Keybinding Conflicts

I've identified a few potential conflicts with existing shortcuts:

• Ctrl+B: This is currently used to Open Action Panel. In Emacs, Ctrl+B is for moving the cursor backward ("backward-char").
• Ctrl+P: In the Clipboard History, this is the shortcut for Open Filter. In Emacs, Ctrl+P is for navigating to the previous line ("previous-line").
• Ctrl+F: In Emacs, this is for moving the cursor forward ("forward-char"). However, in many applications, Ctrl+F is the standard shortcut for Find, which could be a consideration.

Additional context

I would like to understand the developers' perspective on keybindings. Is the goal to support optional schemes like Emacs, or is it preferred to maintain a single, consistent user experience for everyone?

If integrating Emacs keybindings is a welcome idea, I would love to get feedback from the community and maintainers on the best way to resolve the conflicts mentioned above. Once we reach a consensus, I am willing to refine the implementation, update the documentation, and submit a pull request. (I have already successfully built and run a local version with some of these features implemented, with much of the code written by an AI).

Thank you again to the author and maintainers for all your hard work

[quadratech188]

I agree - even as a vim user I would prefer Ctrl+N/P to Ctrl+J/K.

Introduce a "Keybinding Scheme" option in the settings page. This would preserve the current Default scheme (unchanged) and add a new, optional Emacs scheme.

Personally I think we should just bite the bullet and implement custom keybinds.

Add Emacs-style editing keys in the search bar (Emacs mode only). This would include common bindings like:

We could technically also implement this with custom keybinds, but clogging up the keybind list with entries like 'kill-line' and 'backward-kill-word' I'm not entirely happy with.

@aurelien-brabant What's your take? Also what was your reason for using Ctrl+B and Ctrl+P?

[aurelleb]

I like and already thought about introducing keybinding schemes.

I would actually prefer this to custom keybinds for the clogging reason @quadratech188 talked about, but also because a vim keybinding scheme might also imply other non keyboard related changes (for instance typing a : in an input would allow you to enter a very limited command mode and the text would show up in the status bar).

We may introduce customizable keybinds for other, more general things tho (such as opening the action panel)

Also what was your reason for using Ctrl+B and Ctrl+P?

No specific reason. Ctrl+P is what raycast uses, Ctrl+B I just made this one up and stuck with it.

[aurelleb]

Implemented by #364. I'm converting this to a discussion so that we can continue to talk about keybind related things.

[idlip]

Hi falood,
Thank you for adding emacs keybindings. We came before vimmers ;) cheers!

Thanks you aurelien for making vicinae! Such a game changer.

Some nitpicks falood, you missed C-g (lol)
For actions I'd prefer using C-. or C-h since embark (emacs package) is used a lot as action (act) at point

No worries for now tho. If keybindings config will be added in future, it would be cool!

[idlip]

@falood One issue I noticed now, I'm not able to toggle Actions with (Ctrl-o)

Its opening the .desktop file in Editor

In default I can do (Ctrl-b) to open actions fine. But in emacs no key is making actions popup

[falood]

I'm using hyprland and curernt there's no conflict with ctrl-o
I think ctrl+b will conflict with the move left action in emacs mode

[aurelleb]

just letting you guys know, from v0.14.2 the keybinds for the action panel and opening the search bar filter are now configurable from within the settings.

If you use the emacs keybinding scheme you need to make them match your preferences there, as I removed the emacs specific exceptions in the code for this.

The keybinding scheme will stay as a way to control how the editing is done inside the inputs, which is different than just setting a shortcut for a single action.

Maybe we could automatically switch the keybind to something more emacs friendly if the emacs scheme is selected, but I also don't want to override any user preference by doing so, some users might want a very specific shortcut to open their action panel.

[idlip]

Thank you so much!

[falood]

@aurelien-brabant that's great! I just tried the 0.14.2, the new keybind setting is pretty useful, that's a pretty good way to avoid conflict in different modes.
I still have some ideas to dicuss:

1. in emacs mode, add ctrl+f/b to move one char left/right. feat: support ctrl f/b to move cursor right/left in emacs mode #458
2. as @idlip mentioned, we can also add C-g to emacs mode, but need help

• what the behaviour should be? C-g just copy what ESC does? or just close the search bar and exit to the root?
• it seems the esc key has it's separate logic, is it easy to add?

3. I guess a lot of vicinae users come from MacOS, and the super key icon in vicinae is also shown as the macos command key. so is it also a good idea to have ctrl+c/v configurable? I guess there're people like me to want to use cmd c+v for copy paste

[aurelleb]

• ctrl-c/ctrl-v is too deeply integrated with the system to be realistically overwritten by the app. If you want to remap command to control you need to look into a more global solution that will apply to your entire system. I remember doing that a few years back when I was still using an apple keyboard, but I was using PopOS back then so I'm not sure how it's done now.

• the escape key has varying behavior depending on the navigation state. If the user is in the root search it will clean the search bar if not empty, and then close the window if the search is already empty. For any other view that is pushed on top of the root search, esc will immediately pop back to the previous view in the stack.

[bbb651]

It would be really nice to have Ctrl+N/P without opting-in to emacs bindings.
Does it sense to make them part of the configurable keybinds or is it only meant for actions?
It's also really easy to hardcode by changing

vicinae/vicinae/src/services/keybinding/keybinding-service.hpp

Line 28 in a4d6d7f

return event->key() == Qt::Key_J;

to

if (event->key() == Qt::Key_J) return true; 

Is that acceptable or would it be too breaking? I see that Ctrl+N/P around bound to actions by default (I don't yet understand what they do).