vimficiency

Demo.mp4

One of the biggest challenges with Vim is knowing which of the many ways to perform an edit is the most efficient — or what all the applicable motions even are.

vimficiency watches how you edit and surfaces shorter keystroke sequences that would have produced the same result, with awareness of customizable per-key effort and the algorithmically-tractable subset of Vim's grammar. You keep editing the way you already do; the plugin runs in the background and lets you replay suggestions side-by-side to learn.

The benchmark dashboard with details on the search process is here: https://therickyzhang.github.io/Vimfy/

Requirements

• Neovim 0.11+
• A C++23 compiler (GCC 13+ or Clang 16+) and CMake 4.1+ to build the native library. Linux and macOS only at the moment — Windows is not yet supported. Prebuilt binaries are not yet shipped; the plugin is currently built from source on install.

Installation

vimficiency ships a native library (libvimficiency.{so,dylib}) that the Lua side loads via LuaJIT FFI. Plugin managers can compile it as part of the install step.

lazy.nvim

{
  "therickyzhang/vimficiency",
  build = "cmake -B build && cmake --build build",
  config = function()
    require("vimficiency").setup()
  end,
}

If you update the plugin and start seeing an "ABI mismatch" error on load, the prebuilt artifact is stale against the new FFI bindings — run :Lazy build vimficiency to recompile.

packer.nvim

use {
  "therickyzhang/vimficiency",
  run = "cmake -B build && cmake --build build",
  config = function() require("vimficiency").setup() end,
}

vim-plug

Plug 'therickyzhang/vimficiency', { 'do': 'cmake -B build && cmake --build build' }

…then in your Lua config: require("vimficiency").setup().

Manual build

git clone https://github.com/therickyzhang/vimficiency
cd vimficiency
cmake -B build
cmake --build build

Then either place the plugin on your runtimepath or point at the library explicitly:

export VIMFICIENCY_LIB_PATH=/path/to/vimficiency/build/libvimficiency.so

For a full setup with configuration and keymaps, see examples/config.lua.

Usage

vimficiency organizes work around sessions — captures of (start state, keys typed, end state) that the optimizer scores. Sessions form a 2×2 over how they start and end:

	Manual end	Auto end (idle)
Manual start	Mark — :Vimfy start a … :Vimfy finish a	Watch — :Vimfy watch a
Auto start	Recall — :Vimfy recall 6 / recall 3s	Suggest — fires while you edit

Recall is always on, so the lowest-friction entry point is:

" ... edit something ...
:Vimfy recall 6     " analyze the last 6 keystrokes (or 'recall 3s' for time)
:Vimfy play 6       " animate the suggested sequence

For the full set of commands, save/store/fetch flow, configuration, and the effort model, see the user guide.

Documentation

• User guide: doc-src/README.md — installation, the four session types, keymap contract, configuration, effort model, troubleshooting.
• In-editor: :help vimficiency (generated from doc-src/).
• Internals: dev/ — implementation notes on the optimizer, FFI conventions, replay precompute, etc.

License

MIT