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Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

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Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#62

I remain skeptical that keyboard only approaches are better than a well designed interaction with mouse and keyboard. At least with Acme on Plan 9 I’ve found mousing to be fast, efficient, and comfortable.

My main problem is the high cost of repeatedly switching between mouse and keyboard. Type a sentence, move to your mouse, click a link, move back to keyboard, type another sentence, move to your mouse again... It gets repetitive and tiring after a while.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#64
Either browsers have locked things down too tight, or for some other reasons these Vim like plugins are skeletons of their past. And websites are also keen to grab key strokes, e.g. "/" on Github.

Some nice people have kept one alive for Safari as well https://github.com/televator-apps/vimari but there's only so much they can do. It's almost useless.

I tried Vimium-FF (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/vimium-ff) and many other Vim like add-ons in last 2-3 months (after I decided to give Firefox another try after Pocket; and the possibility of ditching MacOS in my personal usage), but no, these plugins are nearly nowhere as useable as they used to be. Page reloads, redirects, weird behaviours at anything I try to do.

Maybe I can spend hours (over days) and have a perfect config file and maybe, just maybe, it will work as intended but then again it might break with next version or next browser update/upgrade.

My most used features were "/" followed by "n" and "shift+n", "t" -> open and "w" -> close tab, "f", "o" -> getting focus in address bar. I think I will rather give up.

Somehow I don't like to tinker anymore in the personal computer usage scenarios and maybe it's people like me who have caused/convinced companies like Apple to close things down and try to make apps and machines simpler (at which they have failed specularly).

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#65

I remain skeptical that keyboard only approaches are better than a well designed interaction with mouse and keyboard. At least with Acme on Plan 9 I’ve found mousing to be fast, efficient, and comfortable.

My main problem is the high cost of repeatedly switching between mouse and keyboard. Type a sentence, move to your mouse, click a link, move back to keyboard, type another sentence, move to your mouse again... It gets repetitive and tiring after a while.

I guess I don't find my typing and my mousing alternate all that much in practice? I'll try to pay more attention and see if I can better articulate this.

I do tend to use Tab to move between text entry fields...

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#66
Thanks for the tip. The 'f' tip is quite nice--much nicer than I have previously experienced with Vimperator and the like. For you Firefox users out there, there is a Vimium fork for Firefox called Vimium-FF.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#67
I am a big advocate for Vimium. For me, moving to the mouse is almost a context switch and I just find them cumbersome. I have played mouse based games my whole life so dexterity is no issue. It's mouse focused UIs are just inefficient in my opinion.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#68
post #57

Unusable because the vi-mode keybindings aren't available until the page finishes loading. Qutebrowser is far superior. Mozilla STILL refuse to produce a "libfirefox" like Chromium does with the CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework). This is incredibly selfish of Mozilla, they insist on being the only ones who can produce a browser using their browser engine, forcing Tor Browser to devote massive resources to maintaining…

I'm fairly sure Mozilla wished they had a libfirefox (e.g. their mobile browsers suffer from not having that), but Firefox is badly designed to make one and they didn't want to invest the resources needed to do such a deep refactoring. Maybe one can be made from the new Android FF, which as far as I understand is a more separated out code base.

I'm fairly sure you're wrong. They went out of their way to kill libxul.so.

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you copy / paste text in that setup? Often I need to copy text from browser and paste into vim.

You can search for text, then press `v` to go to visual mode, and then `y` to yank. There’s also a caret mode you can get into with `vc` that then let’s you move a caret around the page with the motion keys, and you can use it to highlight and yank text like you would in vim.

Thanks for the tip! It seems to work well. When I go to 'visual mode' its easy to move the text selector forward, but what if I want to expand back in paragraph?

Re: Look ma, no mouse: Vimium

#70
Does anyone know of a program for mac which allows you to type using Vim input?

Of course it's probably too hard to make it compatible with all the different types of text boxes, so I'm envisioning a shortcut that you can press, which brings up a small editing window, where you can use vim commands, and then you can copy and paste into whatever text field you want.

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