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Comment by williamscales | Hacker News Reader

This is going to kill pentadactyl, which is currently the only reason I'm using Firefox.

For those who aren't familiar, pentadactyl is a Firefox extension that transforms the user interface to make it more minimal and vim-like. You get to use standard vim bindings to navigate the web and it even gives you a vim-like command line interface to the browser's functionality.

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Horrible news. I use Vimperator, used to use Pentadactyl. The latter forked from the former, but they are still very closely related. Like Emacs and XEmacs.

They are addictive. They turn Firefox into a different kind of thing. I rely so much on custom commands like:

command -nargs=1 proxy set! network.proxy.type=<args>

command -nargs=+ -complete=url site open google site:<args>

map s :site<space>

I'm really afraid of Firefox breaking Vimperator long term. Alternatives are not that nice, and niche browsers tend to be brittle and insecure.

Vimperator is one of two things that keep me on Firefox.

The other is not having a single process per tab. I typically have 40-50 tabs open at any one time. On chrome that chews through memory. On Firefox it chews through significantly less.

I sympathize.

For those who don't mind, or prefer, a less comprehensive vim experience in the browser, I'm very happy with VimFx https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimfx/

It has a ton of vim commands, but I only use hjkl, g and gg. I never can remember whether search with / comes via VimFx or plain FF.

Firefox says it's compatible with multiprocess, but I don't know if it will survive through the switch to WebExtensions. It works fine now.

There's currently a feature freeze and plan to switch to WebExtension after the necessary APIs are added to Firefox: https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860

Give Qutebrowser a try (with the WebEngine backend): https://www.qutebrowser.org/

I switched from pentadactyl a while back and never looked back.

The recent 51.0 update killed Vimperator, so I switched to Firefox ESR to gain some time while I search for a replacement.

Ditto! Unfortunately, it appears that there will be no replacement any time soon, if ever. I am not 100% certain on the details, but apparently, the new WebExtension APIs make certain browser window manipulation impossible. So looks like we're stuck with ESR in short-to-mid term future.

Sadly, I mean a replacement for Firefox altogether. The only plugins I use are Vimperator and uMatrix. I'm posting this from Qutebrowser and I'm very impressed. I just hope I can get uMatrix functionality.

vimfx is the closest replacement at this moment in time.

And it's going to kill TabGroups too. And a lot of other addons from other authors will probably suffer the same fate.

The author of the posted article is the author is TabGroups.

I know, which is why this is doubly sad.

I use vimperator, and I decided to switch to Firefox ESR (which is v45.7.0) - you get security fixes and none of the jazz.

There are ways to run both versions side-by-side, but I will let you figure that out.

Unfortunately neither pentadactyl or vimperator support multiprocess firefox IIUC. The being said adding support for multiprocess is possible, whereas porting to a webextension doesn't appear to be.

Similarly, Conkeror (which provides Emacs rather than vi bindings) is implemented as a XUL application, so it's very likely that it, too, will die.

After discovering cvim for Chrome, I switched and never looked back. Vimium, on the other hand, is a bit different from pentadactyl/vimperator experience.

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