Request Plugin Addition: vim-abolish by tpope

Subvert and the coercion operators are some of my most used features in vim. I can’t believe no-one has suggested it yet!?

Abolish may be a difficult thing to emulate, since it adds iabbrev commands to the .vimrc. But, the subvert substitution and the coercion operations are 🔥

[endowdly]

@vegerot I think there are a couple more issues besides the lack of manpower:

• tpope wrote amazingly well-crafted plugins, but they are often incredibly complex
• vimscript cannot be directly ported to TS/JS, so there will always have to be a herculean refactor
• The other issue is the way vsvim has to tie into the vs code editor–it makes it very difficult to pull off some of the tricks vim can easily do

Because the editor is essentially a web-page, the plugin has to do a couple things: maintain a mode state, action state, and record inputs. There’s only so many combinations of states and inputs we can do at any given time, and some vim plugins just can’t play together well without removing a standard movement or action. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That said, I do think abolish is possible to emulate (closely) in its entirety:

1. Abolish can write and read from an additional json file that would mimic the vimrc and store the abolish list. The then VsVim could just do a constant text search for those words when in insert mode and change them when they are complete.
2. Subvert is just an expanded regex find&replace. This is probably the low hanging fruit because it can be placed in the command palette and accessed by the ex command mode like the other commands.
3. Coerce is tricky as I mentioned before. The easiest way would be to do something like Sneak/EasyMotion does now or utilize difference key modifiers. Coerce would also need a similar hack like how Surround is implemented. This would be the highest difficulty addition.

If I had more time!

[J-Fields]

@vegerot Generally because there’s only so much we can do in our free time. Pull requests are always welcome.