Vimperator: browse the web, vim style
How could I have missed Vimperator until now? It’s a Firefox extension that gives the browser a modal interface like vim’s, with similar keybindings. To open a page in a new tab, for instance, you can type :tabopen sitename. A neat feature I just found is if you’re writing in a textbox and hit <Ctrl-i>, a vim window will open up with the current contents of the textbox; when you quit the editor, the text will be copied back to the textbox.
I’m still on the first page of the tutorial, but a lot more seems to be possible. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing how it achieves the promise of easy mouse-free browsing. Moving and clicking the mouse is the single most unpleasant and time-consuming experience of using a browser to me. The changes Vimperator makes to Firefox are surprisingly nontrivial: I had no idea extensions could exert this much control.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Changing File Associations in GNOME (3/4/2007)
- Fixing Firefox 0.9′s XBEL problems (2/4/2005)
- Anti spam-commenting ideas (4/23/2004)
It has some nice little conveniences, also. Typing o is a shortcut for
pen, and typing t is a shortcut for :tabopen. You can also use macros, key bindings, and custom commands using syntax similar to Vim script. There are even some nice color schemes for it, including Zenburn.
@Scott
Thanks for the tips. I’m wading through the documentation, but it’s always better when someone points out the interesting features directly.
Btw, do you know a Vimperator shortcut for copying the url of the current tab into the clipboard? Currently I have to temporarily disable Vimperator and do the <C-L> <C-C> thing in regular Firefox.
@Alex
Just press “y” key.
@Dema
Sweet! Thanks Dema