macOS has a bunch of apps which can do so, including SketchyVim. Basically you would have all the vim modes motions and operators, inside any text box in the OS / in any app. I just did some looking up and asked LLMs, but didn’t find any linux equivalents of that. Ideally they would work on wayland and have app or window class exceptions.
It looks like this works by following accessibility standards. I’m not sure if an accessibility standard for input fields on Linux, but if it does it should be possible.
If I remember correctly, Wayland forbids to listen to keyboard inputs for security reasons. Each software receives its input, but there is no global listening.
So, in my understanding, this could mean that it’s not possible.
Wayland supports global shortcuts using the global shortcuts portal, so it should be possible. There’s an app called espanso that automatically expands text on Wayland, I imagine similar methods could be used for this.
I didn’t know about global shortcut portal, that’s interesting.
Thank you for your input, I’ve learned something today.
For X11 it could be possible. And Implementing it into the Compositor could be possible too
https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere
The closest thing I could find that isn’t MacOS was this
