macOS has a bunch of apps which can do so, including SketchyVim. Basically you would have all the vim modes motions and operators, inside any text box in the OS / in any app. I just did some looking up and asked LLMs, but didn’t find any linux equivalents of that. Ideally they would work on wayland and have app or window class exceptions.
Wayland supports global shortcuts using the global shortcuts portal, so it should be possible. There’s an app called espanso that automatically expands text on Wayland, I imagine similar methods could be used for this.
I didn’t know about global shortcut portal, that’s interesting.
Thank you for your input, I’ve learned something today.