Vimium Firefox plugin

If you are a keyboard ninja or you just find it annoying to switch to your mouse while surfing, there is a Chrome/Firefox extension that makes mouse-free surfing possible: vimium - vi mode for your browser.

This nice extension allows you to navigate through websites using only your keyboard. The core functionality is that by pressing the f button you see key combinations, which then can be used to navigate to the corresponding link. In practice it looks like the following:

Vimium in Firefox on feldspaten.org

Those yellow boxes mark the keyboard shortcuts. Typing them will navigate to the corresponding link in the same tab, typing them in capital letters opens the link in a new tab.

As a fellow peasant vim user I find this a super nice thing to have. Especially on my laptop, where I don’t want to attach an external mouse. The trackpad is nice, but not as nice as staying keyboard only. Since it aims to be a vim-extension for the web-browser of course the h, j, k and l key bindings are present as well. Nice!

# Shortcuts

Here’s a list of commands that I find useful to have at hand

Key Action
? Show help dialog
H Go back one page
L Go forward one page
t New tab
x Close current tab
X Restore last tab
r Reload page
f Open a link in current tab
yy Copy current URL to clipboard

Navigation

Key Action
h,j,k,l Vim navigation (move left, down, up, right)
gg Go to the top of the page
G Go to the bottom of the page
/ Enter find mode on page
n Find next
N Previous find
o Open URL (shows a input dialog for URL)
O Open URL in new tab (shows a input dialog for URL)

# Installation

You find vimium as a Firefox Add-On or in the Chrome web store (works also for Chromium).

Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Last updated on Oct 10, 2020 09:02 UTC