Surfingkeys – Expand your browser with javascript and keyboard | Hacker News Reader

Surfingkeys – Expand your browser with javascript and keyboard

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77 pointsldong26 comments

There's also vimium: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

And cVim: https://github.com/1995eaton/chromium-vim

Now how do they compare?

As a long time cVim user I've found out that 99% of my browsing can be done with its scroll up/down and open link features.

When combined with this switch to recent tabs extension, the mouse becomes almost irrelevant: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toggle-switch-rece...

Vimium has the `visitPreviousTab` built in for toggling between two tabs.

There is something like this in Surfingkeys,

B - Go one tab history back F - Go one tab history forward

Surfingkeys has a couple of features over cVim that I really like:

-pressing '?' on any page will open the list of shortcuts

-searching through bookmarks / history ('t') is prettier

-very useful feature of switching through all the current open tabs with link hints ('T')

There's one shortcoming I noticed, however, is that when you go to the link hint mode, there are no indication than you entered it. On cVim there's a "follow link" notice in the lower right corner.

I'm a fairly casual user though, someone else will probably find more differences and pros / cons for each extension

I LOVE the scroll with j & k, it's smoothest scrolling experience I've ever seen!

I've tried a bunch of these "vim-like" plugins and I always come back to Vimium (on Chrome). On Firefox I'm stuck with Vimperator, which means I don't use Firefox very often.

Why so? Firefox is still my browser du jour mainly because of Vimperator. I also use Vimium when in chrome, but Vimperator is way more powerful, and plugins are trivial to write: https://vimpr.github.io/plugins-en.html

you should check out VimFX for firefox, its modeled after Vimium but i like it even better.

I tried Pentadactyl and Vimperator before settling on qutebrowser. It's just fantastic and worth checking out if you're in the market for a keyboard-driven browser.

https://www.qutebrowser.org

I'm on pentadactyl and loving it, but haven't heard of qutebrowser - what made qutebrowser stand out for you, if you don't mind me asking?

What got me to make the switch was that it wasn't Firefox. I got so fed up with Mozilla's bullshit that I went looking for anything else, especially after they broke all of my custom addons. Qutebrowser ended up pleasantly surprising me.

How does it compare with Pentadactyl?

For another approach to power-tooling your browser, have a look at Gleebox (http://thegleebox.com/). I use it constantly to navigate between pages, to get a readable version of the page (!read), and to switch between tabs using a fuzzy-search approach. On some sites I've even added custom jquery-based selectors to quickly navigate around the pagfe.

Does someone know if there is a Firefox fork?

VimFX works pretty well on Firefox:

https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx

For Firefox, Vimperator FTW!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/vimperator/

Since Firefox now supports great parts of WebExtensions (https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/08/12/webextensions-tak...), I am curious if this works natively in Firefox 48? (or Firefox Developer Edition, which is at 50 now and might have better support and more bugs fixed)

Pentadactyl is great, but you'll have to find the signed xpi.

Pentadactyl is EOL. Vimperator is still being actively developed..

I think that's an assumed EOL on Pentadactyl because of Electrolysis. The devs don't talk but the community is trying to come up with a way to continue. Vimperator has similar issues with Eloctrolysis, I think?

I hope pentadactyl makes it, cos it's my favorite of the vim extensions. Vimperator just doesn't feel as advanced.

They're both about the same, but vimperator is more frequently updated for compatibility with new Firefox versions.

That alone is much more useful for me.

For me, I'm tracking Firefox esr anyway, so I don't get hit with incompatibility that often.

I'm loving this! Great stuff. Is there a way to exclude websites from activating SurfingKeys?

https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys#hotkey-to-toggle-su...

use Alt-s to toggle it by default.

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