POSIX/BSD vi is extremely primitive—no colors, no language modes, no plugins. But still, using it is a nice exercise in minimalist text editing. That’s what I, as a Lisp programmer, am trying to do, preferably without going insane. This .exrc config file is an attempt to reproduce the functionality of fancy Lisp-friendly systems. Like Emacs and Paredit. In vi.

Just copy/symlink the .exrc to your home directory and start vi.

git clone https://github.com/aartaka/emvi
ln -s emvi/.exrc ~/.exrc

Here are the (Emacs-inspired) bindings I’ve added:

C-x s

Save changes.

C-x b

Edit the previous/alternate file.

C-x q

Exit.

C-x Q

Exit without saving changes.

C-x e

Edit a new file.

C-x .

Jump to a tag/source. Use ctags-compatible solution (likely Universal Ctags) to generate a tags file for your Lisp codebase and use it to navigate around.

C-x d

Delete s-expression.

C-x y, C-x p, C-x P

Copy s-expression and paste it.

C-x x

Jump to matching paren/bracket/brace.

C-x J, C-x K

Jump to next/previous triple-semicolon section.

C-a (

Add empty parentheses and insert right into them.

C-a [

Same, but for square brackets.

C-a {

Same, but for curly braces.

C-a ”

Same, but for double quotes.

C-x (

Wrap the current symbol into parens (paredit-wrap-round).

C-x [

paredit-wrap-square.

C-x {

paredit-wrap-curly.

C-x ”

paredit-meta-doublequote, but without the internal quoting.

C-x )

Slurping the next symbol into the current parenthesized form.

C-x ]

Same, but for square brackets.

C-x }

Same, but for curly braces.

• Thanks to Vasily Gerasimov for the name idea.
• Thanks to Arch Linux forums for giving me pointers on how to fix tag support in vi.