What is the most useable VI/Vim plugin for Eclipse? [closed]

I'm a bit late to this thread - but I wanted to throw in a vote for Vrapper. I used to work with the WindRiver Workbench IDE and I got used to the "Vim layer" it came with. WRW would push a Vim toggle button into the toolbar which allowed the user to activate/deactivate almost all standard Vim key bindings.

When I moved back to vanilla Eclipse I spent quite a bit of time trying to find this same feature and eventually concluded that WindRiver wrote the feature from scratch because it didn't seem to exist. Today I found Vrapper, which pushes a very similar toggle switch into my Eclipse toolbar and seems to have a fairly complete set of Vim key bindings as well. Two nice things: (1) Vrapper can also be activated with a key stroke as with any other Eclipse feature, (2) Vrapper does not deactivate the contextual help that pops up during hover actions.


I am also throwing in a vote for Vrapper ( http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home ). I just started using Eclipse/CDT again for some C coding, and because Vrapper just emulates vi commands in the Eclipse workbench editor (instead of embedding VIM inside of eclipse), it appears to alter other Eclipse IDE functionality less. With vrapper my files end up with less unintentional h,j,k,l,/,? and line-breaks, that otherwise occur because my fingers forget they are not in vi. Vrapper doesn't have all the vi commands I want, but it is a big improvement over the Eclipse editor without Vrapper. It will be even better if they add some of their planned "future features", especially regular expression support.


I rate viPlugin highly enough to pay the small fee for the licensed edition (not licensing it means you get popups every so often, IIRC).

In my opinion it works better than the equivalent Intellij plugin.


I used to use vrapper, but a new plugin now has my vote and financial support. Check out viable at http://viableplugin.com/ It's not free, but any professional developer's time is easily worth the $15.

Viable actually supports regular expressions, which is a huge hole in vrapper. It also doesn't have a number of subtle bugs that vrapper has for basic copy/paste operations.

Viable appears to be fully dead as of mid 2014. :(


I'm using Eclipse J2EE JUNO R1 on Windows 7 x64.

Only Vrapper works.

  • viPlugin: I recently installed viPlugin 2.10.0 on Eclipse Juno via Eclipse marketplace. The result? Don't try it at home because Eclipse hangs. The only way out was to kill Eclipse and manually remove all remnants of viPlugin from the Eclipse installation.
  • Vrapper: At a first glance, this one works as advertised. I noticed that the search/replace option 'c' in ":%s/one/another/gc" does not work because Vrapper will replace all occurrences of "one".