DocKeys

DocKeys exists for a very specific type of user: someone who is already comfortable with vim and feels the friction immediately when forced back into a mouse-first editor.

I built it because I wanted the same editing rhythm I had in vim to carry over into documents. Google Docs is convenient for collaboration, but its workflow always felt slower than what my hands were used to.

Why this project mattered

The code itself is not the most complex thing I have written. What made this project important to me was everything around the code.

This was my first open source project that I published for strangers instead of just for myself. That changes the standard immediately. A private script can be clever and incomplete. A public tool has to be understandable & follow conventional design patterns.

Product decisions

A tool like this only works if it is lightweight & trustworthy.

That mattered because keyboard tools are intimate. They sit directly between user intention and text. If a project like this asks for trust, it should justify it by staying small, inspectable, and boring in the right ways.

Reception

One of the most satisfying parts of this project was seeing that it was useful beyond my own workflow.

At the time I checked the public Chrome Web Store listing, DocKeys showed:

• a 4.6 out of 5 rating
• 12 ratings

I know these numbers are nothing to brag about. But this is not a mass-market utility. It is a niche tool for a very specific behavior pattern. The fact that a couple thousand people installed it and enough of them rated it 5 stars is good enough.

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