It's not vim, but many terminal-based keyboard shortcuts are already available across OS X without installing anything. For example:
- ctrl+p - move cursor up one line
- ctrl+n - move cursor down one line
- ctrl+f - move cursor forward one character
- ctrl+b - move cursor back one character
- ctrl+a - move cursor to beginning of line
- ctrl+e - move cursor to end of line
- ctrl+k - delete all characters from cursor to end of line
[1] https://gist.github.com/gilbert/10fdd692799fc7269b50abbcfb2e...
Those OS X keybindings come from Emacs! I bet some vimmers would refuse to use them just on principle. :)
I'm a vimmer and always use readline bindings in "insert" mode context. I find using vim bindings on the commandline to be infuriating.
On macOS, you need to add the following to $HOME/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to get ctrl-w and ctrl-u to work everywhere in macOS.
{ "^w" = "deleteWordBackward:"; "^u" = "deleteToBeginningOfLine:"; }
Oh, if you like those bindings in insert mode, you are probably already aware of Tim Pope's vim-rsi [1] plugin. If not, check it out, it might have some interesting bindings you aren't using yet.