Vim Motions

Recommended setup

Disable built-in Vim mode

For the best experience, disable Obsidian’s built-in Vim mode:

Settings → Editor → Vim key bindings → off

When built-in vim is off, Vim Motions provides its own enhanced vim engine — a fork of codemirror-vim — with significant improvements over the default.

What the fork adds

The bundled fork provides:

  • Neovim-correct behavior — dd cursor positioning, J join whitespace, di{ multiline brackets, dj/dk at document boundaries, :s cursor, % string-awareness, db/d2w cross-line whitespace, <</>> shiftwidth/expandtab support, block visual insert (I/A/c/C)
  • Correct cursor positioning in Live Preview — prevents the cursor from snapping to delimiter boundaries when navigating into formatted content (*, **, `, ~~, ==)
  • Async motion support — enables native operator-pending EasyMotion (d + easymotion, c + easymotion, y + easymotion)
  • Improved vim state reliability — default keymaps protected from accidental removal, partial key prefixes reset on focus loss, async motion races guarded by generation tracking, stale jumpList markers safely clamped
  • Theme-aligned styling — cursor and selection colors use Obsidian’s CSS variables (--interactive-accent, --text-selection)
  • Live Preview compatible visual-line mode — V selection keeps collapsed markup collapsed instead of expanding hidden content

Using built-in vim mode

The plugin also works with built-in vim mode enabled — it extends whatever vim engine is active. You get all the plugin features (text objects, navigation, EasyMotion, workspace control, etc.) but without the fork’s Neovim-correct behavior and async motion support.

Fork-only features

These features require the bundled fork (built-in vim disabled):

  • Operator-pending EasyMotion (d + easymotion)
  • Surround (vim-surround)
  • Per-mode cursor shapes
  • Neovim-correct cursor positioning
  • Visual-line mode Live Preview fixes

Ecosystem compatibility

When the bundled fork is active, the plugin installs a bridge at window.CodeMirrorAdapter.Vim so ecosystem plugins can discover the Vim API at its canonical location. Any plugin that uses this standard discovery path — the same path Obsidian’s own code uses — automatically works with the fork. See ecosystem-compatibility for details.

<C-w> hotkey conflict

Obsidian’s default “Close current tab” hotkey is Ctrl+W, which conflicts with the <C-w> window prefix. To use <C-w> bindings, go to Settings → Hotkeys, search for “Close current tab”, and remove or rebind the Ctrl+W hotkey. Close-tab remains available via :q or :quit.

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