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Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

Too sad the switch to WebExtensions in Firefox totally screwed up these addons.

I was a religious VimFX user and I can tell you that i mourn having lost that. It's like an era of powerful browsing ended. I use the mentioned Vimium addon, but it's not even close to what we had with VimFX.

Does the keyboard shortcuts in Vimium work when the page is loading? No. How nice is it to have keyboard shortcuts that work sometimes? Extremely frustrating.

How about using "o" to get to the address bar (CMD/CTRL+L)? It opens some overlay on the page where I can't access my bookmarks.

I could go on. VimFX is still somewhat maintained, but you have to run an unsecure browser to use it (like WaterFox).

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I was super happy that the old XUL extensions could hide UI elements. I used Vimperator and hid everything but the Vimperator status line, and it was awesome. Noticeably more screen real estate and less clutter.

For those looking for that more complete Vim experience, qutebrowser (https://qutebrowser.org/) is a good option, IMO.

The one thing holding me back from qutebrowser is the fact that its adblocking capabilities (particularly cosmetic ones) are nowhere near up to par with anything like uBlock Origin or even Adblock Plus on Firefox. I'm happy to see they're working on it, but uBlock-enabled web browsing has been a gamechanger for me, and it'd be hard to give that up to use a browser akin to Tridactyl++.

The second that qutebrowser (or any Webkit/Webengine vim-like browser) gets good adblock/cosmetic filtering support, I'll switch in a heartbeat.

So true. It's so easy to accidentally "escape" context in which Vimium works. I still use mouse and standard shortcuts like ctrl+l a lot after each such use one has to deliberately click inside a web page to return to proper context.

A lot of actions like tab switching can be done in vimium but sometimes it's a chore.

Bookmarks CAN be accessed via "o" in Vimium :)You can also use "b" to browse just the bookmarks.

In chrome if you create a custom search engine and and set the url to javascript: it will focus to the page. I set it to the letter j, so if I ever hit ctrl+l and change my mind, I just hit j then Enter to refocus the page.

It work like a charm, thank you so much :)

I have to agree. Vimium is better than nothing but most of the time it feels like a subpar GUI editor with bolted-on vim binds that sometimes work.

I've been using Vim Vixen[0] since the WebExtension switch, and I haven't noticed any missing features. I'd be curious to see how you found it in comparison.

[0] https://github.com/ueokande/vim-vixen

I use that too, but the specific points they mentioned (keyboard shortcuts while loading, focus the address bar when pressing `o`) do not work there either, and they cannot work with the WebExtension API.

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