Introduction

Last year, I have written a post on how to edit texts inside the browser using Vim/Nvim or browser extensions which have Vim emulations. But none of them is satisfactory enough since they are either not convenient to use or lacking features compared to real Neovim empowered by various plugins.

Firenvim is another project which aims to solve the problem and has done a great job. Thanks to Neovim’s remote UI architecture1, firenvim can activate a Neovim instance in the background and acts as a remote UI client for Neovim. Thus, you can use the full power of Neovim and its plugins inside your browser without any compromises.

Install

To use firenvim, first we need to install it as a Neovim plugin using a plugin manager, for example, with vim-plug:

Plug 'glacambre/firenvim', { 'do': { _ -> firenvim#install(0) } }

The above setting works for Windows and Linux. For macOS, due to the reason that $PATH variable is changed inside browser, we need to use the following command on the shell command line:

nvim --headless -c "call firenvim#install(0, 'export PATH=\"$PATH\"')" -c quit

After that, we need to install firenvim extension for FireFox or Chrome.

Now, close your browser and reopen it. Click in a text area and firenvim should be able to automatically take over the text area and start a neovim instance.

Custom settings

Firenvim provides the variable g:started_by_firenvim when it starts a neovim instance. So you can use this variable to set conditional options and settings for firenvim. For example, set laststatus to zero, and do not show ruler, since the text area is already very small.

You can also customize the filetype created for each website, as per the doc here.

My custom settings for firenvim are as follows:

" Disable vim-airline when firenvim starts since vim-airline takes two lines.
if !exists('g:started_by_firenvim')
    Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
    Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes'
endif

if exists('g:started_by_firenvim') && g:started_by_firenvim
    " general options
    set laststatus=0 nonumber noruler noshowcmd

    augroup firenvim
        autocmd!
        autocmd BufEnter *.txt setlocal filetype=markdown.pandoc
    augroup END
endif

For more configuration, see the doc on project page.

References

  1. Due to this, it only works with Neovim, not vanilla Vim. ↩︎