Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
codefaster.substack.com
Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#2anyone know how vimium compares to tridactyl on firefox?
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#3anyone know how vimium compares to tridactyl on firefox? [0] https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
If it is anything like Pentadactyl was, the difference is mainly that Vimium changes very little in Firefox. You, your spouse or your co-worker can still open Firefox and use it, as used to. Yet with pentadactyl, everything is gone: the addressbar, back-button, menu's etc. This might be what you are looking for, though.
That was one reason for me to ditch Pentadactyl (and also vimperator), and use vimium instead. It allows you to keep using Firefox as normal, gradually sliding into the habit of using the keys.
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#4I've been using vi-like shortcut plugins (vimperator, pentadactyl, vimium, vim vixen and many others, currently using tridactyl) for quite a few years now, and its never been quite the smooth experience I hoped for.
Not even talking about interfaces where you'd expect to need to use mouse (javascript components and others), but there is always the page in which the shortcuts will fail, or some input which will be blocked because the plugin is fighting the webpage for focus. Its pretty much what the article says at the conclusion, it helps reducing, but I still view it as a hassle.
Browsers developed with vi-like modes built-in (vimprobable, vimb, qutebrowser) fared better for me, but then there's other issues like incompatibility or lack of plugins which keeps me from fully using them.
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#5Pro tip: Set your hint characters to keys you can hit with your off-mouse hand. (e.g., being a right-handed qwerty user, mine are asdqwerzxcvtgb) Now you can keep one hand on the keyboard, the other on your mouse (or coffee, or whatever).
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#6I absolutely love vimium. Such a great tool.
[Vimium + i3 + vim + vscode/vmplugin] Means that I rarely have to reach for the mouse, have a tonne of desktop real estate that's easy to navigate and is way more comfortable.
Just having search, simple navigation and the 'f-feature' in vimium is enough for like 99% of my use cases.
It's such a pleasant and seamless experience to code in the editor, hop on over to the terminal to do w/e, skip on over to the browser to look something up, and go back to code. The muscle memory just takes over. Not to mention all the other benefits like having to track down small icons, sometimes changing window state (e.g. unmaximize, moving things around), and how much more effort using a mouse is over 2-3 keystrokes.
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#7I showed this once to a non-techie friend, and they were excited to use it. My little demo covered the difference between F and Shift+F to show how it is case sensitive, and I navigated through multiple pages without using a mouse. I assured them that they don't need to learn all of its commands, and they can open a cheat sheet on any page just by typing a question mark.
This non-disruptive introduction into Vimium made me think about my old Firefox setup. Back in the XUL days, I was hoarding dozens of add-ons that altered the Firefox UI to the extent that others could not use my browser anymore. They would click on a link and wonder why it is not working while my browser would amass many new tabs at a customized, designated place. The browser worked as I intended, but the extent of my customizations made it unusable for regular Firefox users.
Therefore I think that these new, more limited extension APIs offer an overall better experience for end-users. Maintaining usability for "regular users" should be the upper bound for the amount of customization an extension API provides. If it goes beyond that, it seems to get out of control.
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#8I love the idea of Vim shortcuts in the browser, but I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the permissions these extensions require. I get why it's necessary for them to work, but giving access to all history/tabs/browser data feels a bit intense.
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#9Pro tip: Set your hint characters to keys you can hit with your off-mouse hand. (e.g., being a right-handed qwerty user, mine are asdqwerzxcvtgb) Now you can keep one hand on the keyboard, the other on your mouse (or coffee, or whatever).
[deleted]
Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
#10anyone know how vimium compares to tridactyl on firefox? [0] https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
I've tried Tridactyl, Vimium, Saka Keys, Vimium C, and Vim Vixen. Of these, I found Vimium C to work the best and have the least overhead. Tridactyl added a consistent overhead of around 100 milliseconds when loading page, while Vimium and Vimum C added only about 20 ms of overhead.
In terms of features, I think Tridactyl is the most feature complete, but I found Vimium C to be more enjoyable to use. For example, Vimium C seems to produce better hints (e.g. fewer cases of hints for something you can't click on), when compared to Tridactyl. I also prefer Vimium C's "Vomnibar" over the Tridactyl interface, especially with a bit of tweaking to the theme.