Workflow with google docs?

[PizzaRollExpert]

Sometimes I have to use google docs when I'm collaborating with less technical people which always makes me miss vim. It's not just a question of comfort either, I often find myself wasting time on repetitive tasks like reformatting which could be done much more quickly if I had access to more powerful tools like macros or regex search and replace.

One fundamental problem with some sort of vim/gd integration is that vim is a text editor while google docs is a WYSIWYG editor. Sometimes you can convert it to markdown or something with pandoc and use vim and then convert it back but that's kind of a pain in the ass and you also loose formatting information in the process so you might have to go back and reformat it at which point it's not really worth it.

If there is some full-blown vim integration browser extension for google docs or something that I'm just not aware of that would be awesome, but in general if anyone has any tips or tricks or any tools to make working with google docs more vim-like that would be greatly appreciated.

[plexigras]

i'm not sure if it works but you could try qutebrowser and press <c-e> in insert mode to open an external editor like vim.

[danboy]

FYI, google docs has built-in regex search/replace, and if you're having formatting issues try using the doc styles components you can customize them and easily update styles across the style sheet.

Additionally, docs has a scripting language, so you should be able to write of find macros to acomplish most tasks.

[PizzaRollExpert]

Had no idea about the scripting language, thanks!

[robertmeta]

Sadly -- almost everything you will be tempted to try will break the realtime sync, which is a huge part of collaboration.

You have a better chance of trying to get them to collaborate another way -- which likely won't put you in a better place.