Vimperator: a Vim-like Firefox

>"What is the killer feature here?"

The killer feature is being able to navigate around the web without using a mouse. Some people don't like switching between the keyboard and the mouse and would rather use their keyboard most/all of the time. That's who Vimperator is for.

With the examples you gave there's already good keyboard shortcuts for those actions, but in most browsers there aren't decent keyboard shortcuts for selecting links. You can use the tab key to cycle between links, and some websites have extra support for keyboards (for example, Google allows you to navigate through search results using arrow keys), but tools like Vimperator allow you to select any visible link with a small number of keypresses.

Here's a simple example, showing one way to navigate to a link posted on HN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy2as2mBrMM

Pentadactyl isn't the successor to Vimperator, it's just a similar extension with a different feature set and some former Vimperator developers working on it. From what I understand, Vimperator continued to be developed after Pentadactyl was born. Long ago I compared the two and decided to use Pentadactyl because it seemed to be more powerful, but I'm not sure how they compare these days.

A much bigger problem is that Firefox is moving (has moved?) away from XUL and XPCOM, a move which permanently breaks extensions like Pentadactyl (and Vimperator too).

Already Pentadactyl is broken for me on the latest versions of Firefox and Pale Moon (though I can't say for sure that it's because of XPCOM and XUL or for some other reason).

In addition, the Pentadactyl nightly builds aren't signed, so if I want Firefox to allow them to be installed I have to run the Firefox Developer build and make a global preference change to allow all unsigned extensions to be installed.

This breaking of my favorite extensions on Firefox has made me move to Pale Moon, where Pentadactyl was working until recently. Now that Pentadcatyl doesn't even work on Pale Moon anymore, I'm not sure what to do.

You can. I used to be a Vimperator user few years ago. Left because I felt it made browser a bit slow.

yes, you can definitely do that. I'm using the chrome version (vimium) but have back mapped to capital h (for history)

What? Do the docs on the page really say that[0]?

':back' is mapped to 'H' -- in correspondence to the usual Vi/Vim paradigm to move the cursor with the home-row keys, hjkl. ':open' is naturally mapped to 'o' and drops you into a tab-completable shell. ':tabopen' -> 't' and so on.

The key part, as in Vim, are /not/ the mnemonic, highly effective shortcuts. Rather, it's the modal workflow that Vim and it's spritual descendants bring to the table. I'll leave it at that (sounding like a damn preacher already).

[0] Now that I've looked at it, it becomes clear that they're selling rather directly to Vim-acolytes. Pity, perhaps.