A Visual Studio Code update just broke my Spacemacs-like keybindings. While I did appreciate Spacemacs for it's well thought-out design, I thought the effort to maintain all my configuration layers was just too much.

Visual Studio Code managed to get close enough for me with it's sane defaults. However, I did miss Spacemacs ingenious leader key, in which pressing space in Vim's normal mode would pop up a dialogue telling you which following keys did what. This way, any command is just 3-4 keypresses away, discoverability is high, and the most used commands will soon be committed to muscle memory.

VSpaceCode did a good enough job for VSCode, but as said, broke just today. Also, it doesn't provide the pop-up, greatly reducing the discoverability.

But then this popped up:

leadermode

Earlier today this extension had only one single download, and the whole project was started by Microsoft employee michaelgriscom just 4 days ago. It seems quite promising, giving key hints in the VSCode status row. However it's currently missing some of the project- and file selection functionality of VSpaceCode and conflicts with Vim mode. This latter issue is a dealbreaker for me, but I will be keeping my eyes on this extension!

Here's a gif from the repo, showing some functionality:

leadermode_usage_animation