Vimium - the hacker's browser

[mmmdelihsus]

Vimperator for Firefox does the same. http://vimperator.org/vimperator

One hint: have an alternate browser for normal users to use when they borrow their laptop for a second. Because not having an address bar or any icons or tabs tends to confuse them :)

[thingie]

(You don't want to let anybody else use your browser profile. Especially with all those "smart" address bars. Rather set up a guest account and switch to it. It's also very useful for presentations. Recent Linux distros makes user switching very easy and reliable, so it's worth doing even for a very short sessions.)

[jamesbritt]

" have an alternate browser for normal users to use ..."

Or not, if you don't want to encourage borrowing. :)

"I'll just be a sec! No, really."

[RevRal]

Okay, I'm having a really hard time figuring out how to install my colemak.vimp plugin for vimperator.

I hate asking, but where do I put vimperator plugin files?

[quizbiz]

Is there a help mode for inputs like there is for links?

[Gigamo]

I think comparing Vimperator to Vimium is not really fair. Vimperator does a LOT more than just adding keybindings :)

[grogers]

I've been using this for a little while and have been really liking it.

I wish there was an option to make it so you would have to manually switch to insert mode, I hate having it automatically switch and find myself doing the wrong thing - either typing and find myself jumping around, or trying to jump around and having it not do that.

I wish ctrl+f didn't pop up the chrome search box though and actually scroll down a full page...

I also wish the searching was more fully featured like vims, for example the * key to search for the word would be great, and being able to :set noignorecase would be nice.

I also have in my mental model of vim that ctrl-t is backwards in the tagstack, so I often hit ctrl-t to go backwards in history and accidentally open a tab. Until they allow remapping of keys, theres not much to do about that one.

[csmajorfive]

Good suggestions. Feel free to file these as feature requests on GitHub. Let us know what platform you're on because Ctrl+F shouldn't be bringing up the find interface.

We do allow remapping of keys. Check out the settings page.

[stevan]

Lightweight alternatives (to heavyweight Chrome and Firefox):

xxxterm; http://www.peereboom.us/xxxterm/html/

uzbl; http://uzbl.org/

surf; http://surf.suckless.org/

vimprobable2; http://www.vimprobable.org/

[postfuturist]

I wouldn't exactly call Chrome heavyweight. It runs fine on my 10 year old thinkpad running an Lxde desktop (256 MB, 550Mhz machine).

[_delirium]

Is there a good writeup anywhere about how those compare? Which should I try out first?

[loire280]

Vimium brings me one step closer to never having to use a mouse. Hints mode and vim-style navigation keys are my favorite features. ? (shift-/) brings up a handy shortcut overlay. A must-have if you live in vim.

[Qz]

And brings me one step farther from never having to use a keyboard. Well, actually no it doesn't affect me at all -- but I do hate keyboards.

[andrewcaito]

I've missed Vimperator https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4891 since moving primarily to Chrome. It's so nice to not have to go back and forth to the mouse when coding and testing, and my brain doesn't have to shift gears as much.

[aohtsab]

same! really liked vimperator but not enough to switch to firefox.

[jrockway]

The home-row hints are much better than the number hints that conkeror and vimperator give you. Although I did get really good at typing numbers, thanks to conkeror.

[presto8]

In my opinion, Vimperator's hints are better. Vimperator only uses numbers for hints because letters are used to narrow down the results. If you are on a page with a lot of hints, just start typing a few letters contained in the link. All of the hints that don't match will disappear, greatly reducing the clutter on the screen and often only a single digit is needed.

[Periodic]

This is the one feature I saw that was a marked improvement over vimperator.

However, there are still too many small annoyances like not being able to open a new location in a new tab with a single command.

[davatk]

If I'm remembering correctly, vimperator used to use a similar system. I think so that you could narrow the link choices by typing.

[sukuriant]

How long until emaxium (to keep the same pronunciation) comes out?

[docgnome]

Actually there is a project to build a Webkit based emacs style browser a la Conkeror. It's called minno. http://minno.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi They are just waiting for the Sqeme QT bindings to be more usable.

[chbarts]

Emacs users already have emacs-w3m, but it would be nice to have something better.

http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/

[gfodor]

Author is either blissfully unaware of, or is not giving due credit to, Vimperator, which is incredible and was the first real Vim-enabling plugin AFAIK.

Great to see someone bringing this to another browser, though.

[jrockway]

Since the link hints are exactly like vimperator's, I'm sure he's seen vimperator before.

[luigi]

I'm using Vimium as a key tool in my efforts to become completely mouseless.

http://luigimontanez.com/2010/mouseless-monday-1-vimium-goog...

[johnfn]

I like your website and the concept behind it, but let me just say that the moving star background is really distracting. You should do something about that.

[ZeroGravitas]

Okay, I've made the jump. Now I feel the pain of those using audible or other non-mouse driven browsers when I stumble across a site (e.g. our very own Hacker News) that has multiple identical link texts that go to very different places.

It's slightly better in Vimium, with Vimperitor I try to type the unique number of comments on a story as a shortcut and end up following some random link.

Also, the default setting in Vimperitor to follow the link as soon as you type a key that uniquely identifies it crazy. It means you have to be paying attention to every link text on the page or else the remainder of your typing gets given to the next page as commands. You can :set fh=1 in order to force it to wait for enter.

[carrierwave]

Protip: In Vimperator, when using hints to follow an "x comments" link, hit backslash prior to typing the number of comments. Escaped, Vimperator will interpret the numbers as text to be searched rather than link identifiers.

[iamdave]

Call me oblivious, but having never used emacs, vi or vim I love my GUI I'm sold. This is incredibly helpful since I use a USB keyboard with my laptop and frequently don't feel like reaching across my desk to get to the mouse.

Thank you!

[Periodic]

The things I'm really feeling are missing are being able to open a new tab with a URL by only typing one key more than the URL itself. In Vimperator this is "t", but with all the chrome-based vim-ish plugins so far I have to open up a new tab, focus the location bar, then type what I want. Sometimes that covers the tab I was looking at so I can't reliably see the spelling of what I wanted to type. This one is huge for me, and is one of my most used commands after "d".

[txxxxd]

You can do almost the same thing in chrome without any plugins. Just replace t with Ctrl-L and when you hit enter after the URL hold down ALT (to get a new tab). Same number of keystrokes, slightly more acrobatic.

[hyyypr]

Opera also has it's vim bindings. Works quit OK, although not as good as vimperator. http://my.opera.com/Blazeix/blog/vimperator-for-opera (Note: this is not an extension, just a set of bindings, still the behaviour is pretty close to vimperator)

[arnorhs]

What I really miss is the '?' shortcut in Firefox for searching on the page only in links. (There might be a different key combination for US keyboards)

If chrome would implement that, my life would improve at least 5%

it makes navigating though links very easy and much more intuitive than the link search that's demoed in the video.

[paulbaumgart]

It's ' in my (en-US) version of Firefox. And agreed.

[ax0n]

Alright... I said I didn't like it, but with this, I'll give Chrome another try.

[bingaman]

See also: Vrome. http://github.com/jinzhu/vrome

I'd love to switch completely but neither of these seem as polished as Vimperator.

[quizbiz]

Is there a way to hide the chrome address bar and toolbar?

[samratjp]

Fwiw, you can have basic vim shortcuts binded to google search results:

http://www.google.com/experimental/

[postfuturist]

I like and I'm using it, now, but the extension or possibly the extension hooks have some shortcomings. For example, J and K move forward and backward between tabs, except that it fails on certain pages, like gmail (likely JavaScript interference), so you get stuck unless you use Chrome's built-in Ctrl-PageUp or Ctrl-PageDown commands which still work to switch between tabs.

[solutionyogi]

Their settings page allows you to disable this plugin on GMail.

[eduardoflores]

Doesn't work with international keyboards...