Surfing with Firefox and Vimperator

Posted on March 8, 2010 by Ghodmode

A couple of weeks ago, I took a fresh look at Vimperator, an extension for Firefox that adds some of the familiar keyboard-based power of the Vim text editor to web surfing.

When I’m trying to work fast I have to laugh at myself as I often try to scroll with the ‘j’ and ‘k’ keys, tap the [Esc] key several times, or try to save my work using a quick ‘:wq’ when I’m done reading a tab. It’s like some kind of muscle-memory.

I learned about Vimperator quite a while ago from another coder (ironically, an Emacs user) who swore by it. I tried it briefly, but I didn’t stick with it because I was working against a deadline and I didn’t want to take the time to learn yet another tool.

After I finished my last project, I decided to give Vimperator another shot. I didn’t have a looming deadline, so I figured I could take a little time to figure it out.

After loading the extension and restarting the browser, I was presented with basically an empty white box. The menu bar, address bar, bookmarks bar, and buttons were all gone leaving only my (purposefully spartan) home page. This was a little bit of a shock, but I just tried the same thing I do in Vim when I don’t know what command to use… ‘:help’.

Vimperator, like Vim, is very well documented. That first help screen has a link for a Quick-start tutorial.

After a very short learning curve, I’ve found that I can use the web much more quickly and easily with Vimperator. This isn’t going to be true for everyone, but I suggest that everyone who is comfortable editing in Vim should give Vimperator a try.

Here are a few of the things I learned that I find useful:

  • I can turn my bars back on with the ‘guioptions’ settings.
  • Vertical scrolling with j/k, horizontal scrolling with h/l
  • Use ‘o’ to open a new URL in the current tab or ‘t’ to open it in a new tab.
  • Use ‘d’ to close (delete) the current tab or ‘u’ (undo) to reopen a closed one.
  • Some Awesomebar features are accessed by pressing the tab key after typing something.
  • I can use Ctrl-v to allow a single hotkey to bypass Vimperator or Ctrl-z to use Firefox the traditional way until I press Esc again.

References:

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Ghodmode

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  • Ghodmode

    >Thanks for your comment :)

    I gave Conkeror a try after reading your comment. I don't think it's for me, but it's interesting and I'd like to see it gain momentum both as a tool for Emacs users and as a XULrunner app.

    I think XULrunner is under-appreciated and I've been thinking about writing an article on the topic. Conkeror would definitely be an excellent example.

    My first impression of it was that it was a little too stripped down and featureless but that's possibly because I'm not comfortable with the Emacs key-bindings. I seem to have a mental block to learning Emacs, but that's my own limitation.

    The default setup for Vimperator is also sort of stripped-down and featureless, but I'm very familiar with the Vi-style keybindings and I re-enabled features that I liked such as the address bar and bookmarks bar.

    If you're a regular Emacs user, can you take a look at Firemacs? I'd like to know how suitable it is for browsing and also how it stands up to Conkeror.

    Thanks.
    –
    – Ghodmode

  • m3troidsnes

    >There is also Conkeror browser that works the same way but instead of Vim it's based on Emacs. I've tried it after Vimperator and I was a little disappointed becouse of lack of some features (like bookmarks removing/editing) and good documentation. Look like it's to early for this project to compete with Vimperator when mainstream users are taken into account.