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Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

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Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#11
I'm sorry but this is near unusable since the death of XUL and introduction of WebExtensions. I was a truly avid user of VimFX which did the same thing. Vimium these days does not work when a page hasn't finished loading and it doesn't work on blank pages (about:blank) or any other "system page" (like the preferences or addons). The "o" key can no longer highlight the address bar but brings up a non-native address bar that does not find my bookmarks as it should.

Imagine you couldn't click on another tab with your mouse pointer while the current active one is loading. Yes, it's as terribly frustrating as it sounds.

In the XUL days I could even use vim shortcuts to access every button in the Firefox UI!

Luckily there is a solution for now. VimFx[1] is still being updated and works with the LegacyFox shim!

[1] https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#12
post #4

This has been a great extension but i'm always nervous about Chrome extensions and their seemingly global access to everything and some dev's willingness to sell to malware devs. It would be interesting if Chrome let you point an extension to a github repo (and tag or commit hash) and pull source from there.

yeah the permissions and ecosystem are scary. I have a very small extension (1000-ish users), and even I get "monetization opportunity for your extension" emails maybe... every other week?

Sometimes I feel like the only reason it's not a platform-breaking problem is that most extension devs make enough money from their day job to not care about a quick buck.

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#13
post #11

I'm sorry but this is near unusable since the death of XUL and introduction of WebExtensions. I was a truly avid user of VimFX which did the same thing. Vimium these days does not work when a page hasn't finished loading and it doesn't work on blank pages (about:blank) or any other "system page" (like the preferences or addons). The "o" key can no longer highlight the address bar but brings up a non-native address ba…

Have you heard about qutebrowser, Luakit, and Nyxt?

I like qb the most, as it's fairly stable and fully-featured. It offers full keyboard control, and many cool features like bindings for host-granular permissions for js and images, and is also scriptable. Built-in decent adblocker.

The main annoyance about it for me is it doesn't come with DRM, but it could also be seen as a feature, because it saves me a lot of time I'd otherwise watch arguably crap content.

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#14
post #9

I've used this and other similar extensions but always them being an extension makes for a slow and unreliable experience imo. Pressing shortcut keys just might work depending on the focus and other current state. Going back to qutebrowser after trying out these extensions feels so fast and reliable in comparison - when you press a key it will instantly work like it should.

I just looked and qutebrowser is basically a webview right? I've played with webviews a little and it didn't feel much different than other injection-style scripting. What would make that better than the extension? FWIW I tried the vimium or vimperator before and found it clunkier than I expected, so I can believe qutebrowser is better.

It's a lot more than a webview in the sense that keyboard is a first-class citizen, everything is accessible via keyboard, the bindings are much more reliable and responsive, and many more features make it a predictable and stable experience.

For example, qutebrowser supports a hinting mode where I press Enter to activate a link after selecting it with hints, which almost entirely eliminates accidentally clicking the wrong link, something I still do occasionally with Vimium+Firefox.

It is also much more scriptable, so I can for example create a keyboard binding for clipping selected text (with references) directly to my localhost pastebin.

Every action you can imagine is scriptable and bindable.

It has built-in support for adblock and granular JS/image/etc permissions.

Great keyboard-accessible bookmarking system.

Keyboard-accessible and reproducible settings and bindings with autocomplete and lookups.

Not to mention that it does not on a regular basis non-consensually take away features I use/introduce features I don't want and can't disable.

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#15
post #11

I'm sorry but this is near unusable since the death of XUL and introduction of WebExtensions. I was a truly avid user of VimFX which did the same thing. Vimium these days does not work when a page hasn't finished loading and it doesn't work on blank pages (about:blank) or any other "system page" (like the preferences or addons). The "o" key can no longer highlight the address bar but brings up a non-native address ba…

Have you heard about qutebrowser, Luakit, and Nyxt? I like qb the most, as it's fairly stable and fully-featured. It offers full keyboard control, and many cool features like bindings for host-granular permissions for js and images, and is also scriptable. Built-in decent adblocker. The main annoyance about it for me is it doesn't come with DRM, but it could also be seen as a feature, because it saves me a lot of tim…

> Have you heard about qutebrowser, Luakit, and Nyxt?

Yes, but neither support extensions AFAIK. Not ready to take my browsing back to a pre 2004 era. :)

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