How to add a shortcut to Atom

Atom has become my default editor. Before I used vim most but thankfully there is a vim-mode plugin to get most of the benefits.

However not everyone is comfortable using vim navigation keys to edit code. For my team members I added a shortcut to my Atom config to quickly enable and disable the vim-mode plugin. It pays to be a good team player!

You can extend your Atom editor by adding functionality to your init.coffee.

// ~/.atom/init.coffee
atom.commands.add 'atom-workspace', 'vim-mode:toggle-enabled', ->
  disabledPackages = atom.config.get('core.disabledPackages')
  disabledPackageIndex = disabledPackages.indexOf('vim-mode')
  if disabledPackageIndex is -1
    disabledPackages.push('vim-mode')
  else
    disabledPackages.splice(disabledPackageIndex, 1)
  atom.config.set('core.disabledPackages', disabledPackages)

Then to add a shortcut to execute vim-mode:toggle-enabled defined above add to your keymap.cson.

// ~/.atom/keymap.cson
'atom-workspace':
  'ctrl-alt-v': 'vim-mode:toggle-enabled'

Now I can do ctrl-alt-v to turn vim-mode on and off.

Read more about The Init File and Customizing Key bindings.

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