Look ma, no mouse: Vimium • Hacker News Board

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#21

Post by bovine3dom » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

YorickPeterse wrote: post #10

asselinpaul wrote: post #2

anyone 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, Vim…

FWIW - mostly for other interested readers - in Tridactyl we made hints which might be useless grey recently. They correspond to JavaScript events and are sometimes the only way to click a button.

If you want Vimium-style behaviour where these elements are not hinted you can just do `:bind f hint -J`.

We also have a Vimium-style theme which you can access with `:colours shydactyl`. The theme could do with some polishing if anyone's interested.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#22

Post by bovine3dom » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

berkes wrote: post #3

asselinpaul wrote: post #2

anyone 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…

Tridactyl is much less extreme than Pentadactyl, at least out of the box. Probably the "worst" thing we do is override Ctrl-A and Ctrl-F.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#23

Post by Sodman » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

wcoenen wrote: post #18

Sodman wrote: post #16

I love vimum, use it myself, but my biggest gripe with it (also half-addressed in the article) is that sites with good power-user focused keyboard shortcuts built-in are almost always going to beat a generic plugin like vimium. So you're left with choosing one of two compromise options: 1) Ignore the nice app-native keyboard shortcuts and just use vimium everywhere (Frustrating when single-key shortcuts in the app ar…

> I really wish vimium had some kind of modifier for "send next key to website", so I could have my cake and eat it too. I thought that was what "insert mode" was used for. Hit i to go into insert mode, ESC to get out.

As a daily vim (editor) user, I had no idea that's what insert mode did in this context! I had never used it in vimium before. Thank you!!!

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#24

Post by RMPR » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

bocytron wrote: post #20

preommr wrote: post #6

I 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 term…

What do you mean by "vmplugin" ?

Not OP but they are probably talking about the vscode extension that provides Vim keybindings https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#25

Post by _ikke_ » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

wcoenen wrote: post #18

Sodman wrote: post #16

I love vimum, use it myself, but my biggest gripe with it (also half-addressed in the article) is that sites with good power-user focused keyboard shortcuts built-in are almost always going to beat a generic plugin like vimium. So you're left with choosing one of two compromise options: 1) Ignore the nice app-native keyboard shortcuts and just use vimium everywhere (Frustrating when single-key shortcuts in the app ar…

> I really wish vimium had some kind of modifier for "send next key to website", so I could have my cake and eat it too. I thought that was what "insert mode" was used for. Hit i to go into insert mode, ESC to get out.

Yes, exactly. It also allows you to specify keys that it should ignore per site (so that the webapp always receive them), or even completely disable vimium for a site (or just specific pages on a site). By default, it's not active on gmail for example.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#26

Post by bovine3dom » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

Sodman wrote: post #16

I love vimum, use it myself, but my biggest gripe with it (also half-addressed in the article) is that sites with good power-user focused keyboard shortcuts built-in are almost always going to beat a generic plugin like vimium. So you're left with choosing one of two compromise options: 1) Ignore the nice app-native keyboard shortcuts and just use vimium everywhere (Frustrating when single-key shortcuts in the app ar…

> I really wish vimium had some kind of modifier for "send next key to website", so I could have my cake and eat it too.

Tridactyl has this, bound to ctrl-v by default. Implementation is here [1] if anyone wants to try to add it to Vimium.

[1]: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/5e8f94ff06bd5f14...

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#27

Post by diehunde » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

I use a lot of shortcuts when browsing and when I have to switch from MacOS to Linux is always a pain in the ass because they change and is not easy to remap all of them.

Maybe trying something like this would alleviate this issue for me.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#28

Post by stevenhuang » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

hs86 wrote: post #7

I 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 m…

I don't agree. Regular users simply won't know to install those plugins in the first place. Leave the advanced APIs in for those that seek it. Security and maintenance concerns aside, of course.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#29

Post by jrockway » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

I'm glad this was posted. I really liked how they introduced only one feature; that was enough to push me to install and get past "I don't know vim, why would I like this". I can press 'f' and type letters to follow links. No vim-ness. Just a nice feature. (You can press "?" to see more features.)

(I used an XUL-based web browser with Emacs keybindings many years ago and loved it. But I had to switch to Chrome, and XUL went away, so I kind of gave up.)

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#30

Post by JoshTriplett » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #29

I'm glad this was posted. I really liked how they introduced only one feature; that was enough to push me to install and get past "I don't know vim, why would I like this". I can press 'f' and type letters to follow links. No vim-ness. Just a nice feature. (You can press "?" to see more features.) (I used an XUL-based web browser with Emacs keybindings many years ago and loved it. But I had to switch to Chrome, and X…

> I can press 'f' and type letters to follow links.

You can get this with standard Firefox, no extension needed. For instance, on the HN main page, hit ' (single-quote) then "vi" then [enter] and you'll follow the link to this article.