Ability to easily jump to the beginning of any visible word in the active buffer

[damoonrashidi]

Before you begin
I tried searching for jump / cursor etc but didn't find anything relevant, so hopefully this isn't a dupe, sorry if it is. Also I recognise that this is a pretty low priority request!

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
No

Describe the solution you'd like
I'd love for a way to move the cursor to the beginning of any visible word in the active buffer using only keyboard shortcuts.

Describe alternatives you've considered
The closest thing currently available is hitting cmd+shift+o to open the outline viewer and go to a declaration in close proximity to where you want to go to minimise the number of arrow key presses necessary. Unfortunately this doesn't work if there isn't a declaration close to where you want to jump.

Another alternative is hitting ctrl+g and jump to the beginning of specific line and then hitting ⌥ + → until you hit your destination.

Screenshots
There are extensions for sublime/vs code that achieve this by overlaying a character sequence over every word when a keyboard shortcut is hit as shown below.

before hitting cmd+shift+;

after hitting cmd+shift+;

after typing any highlighted character / pair of characters (e.g. u vk nd etc) the cursor jumps to the highlighted location.

[kungfusheep]

Great suggestion - A good working reference for this is the AceJump plugin for sublime. This is the thing I miss most when I'm using zed, currently.

[damoonrashidi]

Great suggestion - A good working reference for this is the AceJump plugin for sublime. This is the thing I miss most when I'm using zed, currently.

Ye sorry, forgot to mention, AceJump for sublime and EasyMotion for VS Code are some editor specific extensions that do this.

[rkusa]

Big +1! If it helps, here is another example. Amp has this built-in and calls it Jump Mode: https://amp.rs/docs/usage/#jump-mode

[alejandrovrojas]

Doesn't this seem way out of scope at this point in Zed's development? In terms of code navigation a better start would be further improvements to the vim mode.

[kungfusheep]

It depends on the target audience - does Zed simply wish to emulate vim or does it wish to define itself as a serious contender in the text editor market with its own ideals, benefits and control schemes?

Personally if I wanted to use something that controlled like vim I would use vim, or neovim, for example.

I’m here testing Zed because the developers genuinely seemed enthusiastic about creating something special. If we just aim for “sublime but better plugins” or “vscode but fast” then I feel it will have been a missed opportunity.

[JosephTLyons]

Doesn't this seem way out of scope at this point in Zed's development? In terms of code navigation a better start would be further improvements to the vim mode.

Doesn't this seem way out of scope at this point in Zed's development? In terms of code navigation a better start would be further improvements to the vim mode.

Yeah for sure, having foundational Vim stuff is going to help Vim users transfer over; Rest assure that the team is working on bringing Vim mode up to speed with what Vim users expect.

[damoonrashidi]

Doesn't this seem way out of scope at this point in Zed's development?

Ye for sure at this point, just throwing it out there to see if there is any chance further down the line. It's a very reasonable take that this is a low priority feature right now, if it should be implemented at all.

[notpeter]

Closing in favor of:

• easymotion vim #4930
• Flash.nvim style search in a document. #14801

There is also a separate request for UI navigation using similar motions:

• Suggestion: add mouse-free UI navigation akin to onivim #5063

Thanks for reporting.