I have used vi in the terminal for years and really like it. Now that I am working on some Jupyter notebooks in VS Code, I added the Vim extension from vscodevim. This result is that vi works only in the context of a given block in the notebook. Therefore some of the most useful shortcuts (for me: / to search for a given word, '. to jump to the most recently edited line of code, * to start searching for instances of the word under the current the current cursor location, u to undo last change, and ctrl+R to redo it) feel severely handicapped, because they only operate in the siloed context of a single code block, and cannot look back into, or jump into, or edit, any other code block. (It is also really jarring to me that esc will not only move vi from insert to command mode, but then from command mode to the notebook level mode, where none of the above commands work).
Anyway, is there an option to add these vi capabilities at the notebook level? Perhaps the answer is to just learn to live with it, and find all the VS commands for the notebook level. All help/knowledge is appreciated, thanks!
This is a partial answer, but you can change the keybinding (Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts) for Notebook: Stop Editing Cell from Escape to another key (I use Q) to prevent accidentally exiting the cell.