I dunno whether it might help you out, but some (crazy) people have started out an implementation of vi in Perl.

Still, I'm wandering how you will tell apart "custom actions" from regular commands, and how the users will know that what they thought would be a regular command has in fact been overridden and now does something completely different from what they expect (depends on how you tune the time out, it can become pretty confusing, not to mention dangerous).

e.g., d3foo normally deletes up to the 3rd occurence of the letter 'o' on the current line, then starts a new line below the current one. Odds are that some foolishly devised map: commands will make the whole thing unusable.

Vim has a nice approach (IMHO) of prefixing non-standard commands with g, a letter that's otherwise unused in standard vi.

HTH

--bwana147