
Vimium - the hacker's browser - csmajorfive
http://vimium.github.com/
======
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.)

~~~
Goosey
(I agree, but why are we whispering?)

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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.

~~~
frou_dh
"unmap all" would be nice so that you don't have write 30 lines blasting the
defaults if you want to go custom :-)

~~~
csmajorfive
Will do -- likely tonight. <http://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/issue/116>

------
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).

------
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.

~~~
jrussino
It seems to me that people just don't like switching between input schemes.

If most of your interaction with the computer is done by typing - in a text
editor or at the command line, for example - then being able to use the
keyboard for those other actions like switching tabs, scrolling windows,
opening files, etc. allows you to stay in the same "input mode" for longer
chunks of time.

I'm not so familiar with vim, but it seems that it's so popular because of all
of those keyboard shortcuts allow people to interact with the computer
consistently without having to interrupt their "flow".

If switching from mouse to keyboard (or vice versa) involves a little bit of
extra cognitive processing, that adds up over time and can make your
experience just a little bit slower and more frustrating. I guess switching
between different keyboard shortcut schemes can have the same sort of effect,
so having those same mappings of keystroke(s) --> computer action(s) available
across multiple programs must be satisfying to the people who have adopted
them.

~~~
jff
Damn, I typed a big long thing, then hit the wrong key combo and zapped it
all. Is that irony?

Anyway, the gist of what I wanted to say is that when you use vim, you do a
lot of thinking about how you're going to position the cursor or exactly how
you're going to do a visual selection of some chunk of text. When you use
something like Acme that's mouse oriented, you mostly use the keyboard to
enter text, while the mouse is used to point and select text. Changing the
cursor is a visual, spatial thing, as is selecting text; the mouse is ideal
for this, being a two-DOF system, while the keyboard is a discrete/linear
tool.

I'm a huge fan of Acme for most of my editing, but I like vi for quick stuff,
plus there's a certain charm to firing up my old VT-220 or ADM-3 and hacking
away. However, when I see somebody trying to do serious editing in vim,
flailing away madly to move the cursor to the right place and do that funky
funky visual selection thing, I get impatient and a bit ticked; he feels busy
because he's slamming all these keys, but I just keep wondering what the hell
is taking so long.

Vimperator and this new Chrome extension have a good idea in providing
keyboard shortcuts that are both extremely brief (one keystroke, no need for
Ctrl combos) and pretty familiar to people who use vi. However, people should
be mindful of the best uses of _all_ their input devices, not merely the
keyboard (which is certainly more 1337, but not always the best choice).

~~~
philwelch
I actually take the opposite view. When I'm selecting text or placing a
cursor, there's a discrete location between two letters I want to hit, and it
can be annoying having to aim at it with a mouse and possibly miss. It also
seems that vim is somewhat faster for me, though I've never measured it. Vim
is definitely better for micro-scale cursor positioning--down a line or over a
word or two.

------
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.

~~~
Periodic
I really like Chrome, but not enough to switch from vimperator.

------
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.

~~~
jokermatt999
Also, as I mentioned in my (redundant) comment further up, if your choices are
narrowed down to one link, it's auto selected.

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

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

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

~~~
davatk
What about Conkeror?

Edit: As an emacs user, my ideal browser would be ezbl[1], but development
seems to have stalled.

[1]: <http://github.com/haxney/ezbl>

~~~
chbarts
> What about Conkeror?

Never heard of it.

------
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...](http://luigimontanez.com/2010/mouseless-monday-1-vimium-google-
chrome/)

~~~
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.

~~~
pavs
<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

~~~
plesn
Thanks! I did several times use manually "Inspect Element" and then delete
stuff and add margins..

edit: well, hum, strangely, it does not work so well on some pages, skipping
section's titles.

------
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.

~~~
postfuturist
How exactly does that help?

~~~
alexkay
It explains why the shortcuts don't work on Gmail, they are disabled by
default on google domains, see the preferences.

------
eduardoflores
Doesn't work with international keyboards...

------
s3graham
Any way to start embedded youtube? f doesn't seem to include it.

Also ^fbud don't work for me (ubuntu), maybe not overridable?

------
solutionyogi
Wow. This is awesome. The shortcuts don't work in GMail but that's expected.

EDIT: You can disable the plugin for GMail by going to Settings and entering
mail.google.com in 'Excluded URLs' box.

BTW, has anyone figured out how to focus on a textbox area on the page? Also,
what does the 'insert' mode do?

~~~
grogers
Insert basically passes keystrokes through directly without having them
perform their special function - for example when you are typing into a text
area. Its basically like switching from normal mode to insert mode in vi.

------
frou_dh
Just installed Chrome to try this. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts in Safari
already so the one thing that stands out as awesome in this is the keyboard
link picker (i.e. f or F). Please tell me there's something similar out there
for Safari.

~~~
philc
Unfortunately Safari doesn't really have a well-developed extensions system.
Until they add one, extensions like this will only be available for chrome and
firefox.

------
dasteven
Is there a way in chrome just to get textarea to shunt to external editor (in
my case vim)? Firefox has something for this and it's simple and unobtrusive,
but all the Chome solutions seem heavyweight. Any tips?

------
telemachos
I'm loving it, but I have a silly question: Is it possible to close the help
menu _without_ mousing over to click the [x]? I can't seem to find a key-combo
for this.

~~~
philc
In addition to escape, link hints (type "f") also work on that [x] button.

------
hassenben
Thank you so much for posting this. It is amazing how you can spend years
doing something and realize it doesn't make sense anymore :-)

------
bazookaaa
Wow, this is amazing and I'm now using Chrome fulltime. Anything to not have
to use the Dell mini 10v's trackpad with OS X. ;)

------
consultutah
vimium.com is available.

------
sordina
How does this detect if there are already key-events set for a web-application
such as gMail?

------
andresmh
Does it interfere with Gmail's vi-inspired keyboard shortcuts?

~~~
r11t
It seems to be automatically disabled for any Google domains like Gmail or
Google search.

------
rockstar9
The shortcuts don't seem to work in GMAIL

~~~
d0m
Check the option; you can disable some site. If I remember well, disabling
gmail is given in example. And, Gmail already has some kind of vim shortcut..
you might want to disable them if you like the chrome version better.

------
colinplamondon
Awesome! Just switched away from Safari.

~~~
frou_dh
Do the same and my bookmarks will no longer get synced with my iPhone. This is
cool enough that I'm swaying that way.

------
ivanzhao
having been using Vimperator for a long time now. How is this comparing to
Vimperator?

------
rockstar9
what's the shortcut to play the video on the page?

------
TheBurningOr
Breaks Google Wave

------
confuzatron
ctrl+u and ctrl+d seems quite inconvenient given that they're miles apart on
the keyboard. two handed page-up scrolling? I guess you need to be a vim user
for it to make sense. Presumably the page-up and page-down buttons work too.

------
erlanger
Vim can be used to write things other than code, so the "hacker" thing is
needless...I think that if vim were recognized as simply a powerful editor,
not specialized for code, it could save many everyday people a lot of time.

I say that this is a vim user's browser.

~~~
xinuc
yes dude, but how many technical writer uses vim as their editor?

~~~
jamesbritt
I do.

