Is there a way to use Vim keybindings in Google Colaboratory?

Question

Google colaboratory is an amazing tool and the only thing that keeps me from using it more often is the absence of vim keybindings. Is there a way to enable it just like its possible to do for jupyter notebooks and jupyter lab?

Answer 1

It's now available in google colab by default. You can select Vim keybindings from Tools > Settings > Editor, or by typing Ctrl+M H

Answer 2

Here is a little hack to enable Vim mode via the JavaScript console. Annoyingly, it needs to be re-run each time a cell is executed, so I've bound ctrl/cmd-enter and shift-enter to do just that:

function enable_vim() { document.querySelectorAll(".CodeMirror").forEach(function (e) { e.CodeMirror.setOption("vimMode", true); }); }
document.addEventListener('keydown', function(e) {
  if (e.keyCode == 13 && e.metaKey || e.keyCode == 13 && e.shiftKey) {
    for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) setTimeout(enable_vim, 1000 * i);
  }
});
enable_vim();

Just be careful to be in normal mode (not in input mode) when running a cell. Otherwise Vim mode will be permanently disabled for that cell and one needs to reload the entire web app to re-enable it.