Vimium C – Extension to navigate website by keyboard shortcuts | Hacker News Reader

Vimium C – Extension to navigate website by keyboard shortcuts

addons.mozilla.org

68 pointshidden-spyder48 comments

I'm sorry but this is near unusable since the death of XUL and introduction of WebExtensions. I was an truly avid user of VimFX which did the same thing.

Vimium these days does not work when a page hasn't finished loading and it doesn't work on blank pages (about:blank) or any other "system page" (like the preferences or addons). The "o" key can no longer highlight the address bar but brings up a non-native address bar that does not find my bookmarks as it should.

Imagine you couldn't click on another tab with your mouse pointer while the current active one is loading. Yes, it's as terribly frustrating as it sounds.

In the XUL days I could even hit a key to make every button in Firefox UI accessible via keys. VimiumFX gave me the best browsing experience I've ever had and it's gone. WebExtensions Vimium is nothing buta painful reminder.

Qutebrowser may seem like an acceptable remedy, but giving up all the add-ons (mainly uBlock Origin and Tree Style Tab) makes it a no go.

As the_pwner224 points out, Vimium-FF is probably the way to go if you want to give this a try despite its shortcomings...

I loved VimFX and am in the same boat - It was really the best browsing experience.

I remember being upset for months when they killed XUL.

Wish Mozilla would finally start being their old self again and create a browser that is truly customizable. Call it Firefox Pro, I would happily pay for that. But instead we get “Colorways”..

> But instead we get “Colorways”

Yeah, the browser situation sucks and it's getting worse by the day.

> I remember being upset for months when they killed XUL.

You know what, still a week does not pass without me mourning the death XUL...

I'm currently using Waterfox quite a bit. VimFX is still somewhat maintained[1] and works with Waterfox Current.

It should be added that this browser is owned by an adtech company called System1. But my only alternatives at this point is surfing in a straitjacket (without VimFX) or using Waterfox. Haven't really found any apparent wrongdoings by System1 yet, but I guess it's a matter of time...

[1] https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx

And, since plenty of other people are name dropping similar extensions/addons to Vimium (like Tridactyl, Vimari, Vim Vixen etc.), I might as well add they all suffer from the same shortcoming as Vimium C and Vimium-FF because they're all WebExtensions. VimFX is not.

> still a week does not pass without me mourning the death XUL...

I'm coping by suppression. ;)

Haven't looked to much into the alternatives like Waterfox/Pale Moon et al. How are they security wise? Do they offer patches immediately?

Quite a lot of sites break in Pale Moon. Waterfox Current works just as well as Firefox.

> I would happily pay for that

How much would you pay?

I have to agree.

I'm currently using tridactyl, but due to the webext limitations it's far from what even vimfx could do in terms of consistency.

On top of all you said, when you realize not only the browser has inconsistent shortcuts, but a webpage has the right to steal your keyboard shortcut and break the extension itself ...

Every time I use '/' and either it doesn't work because I'm in a field where the extension doesn't have access or in a website where it's redirected to the USELESS site search, I truly get mad.

I'm not even sure why I insist in trying, since there's no clear intention to allow such customization to ever work consistently in the future.

Hear hear, the shortcut stealing is so annoying. Github for example does this; Ctrl-k is some search within Github instead of focusing the search bar in Firefox.

Then we have this option to disable shortcuts in sites which fixes this, but that also disables all shortcuts of the Vimium extension...I want to use an extension like Vimium so badly and its almost there but these little things make it that in the end the whole extension is unusable.

Oh yes it is! Wouldn't it be easy to add an option to block this behaviour? Like a flag in about:config or something.

Yes, there is, to block this by default, set 'permissions.default.shortcuts' to 2.

I just found out that doing that does not prevent shortcuts from the extension to work contrary to what I just posted although I'm sure that when I tested this yesterday it did...:) So this is a step in the right direction.

Then I'm still left with sites stealing focus preventing shortcuts to work. Even though Vimium has an option to prevent sites from doing it, it is not fool proof. YouTrack/Upsource for example insist on stealing focus, so when I'm happily switching tabs using shortcuts as soon as I stumble upon YouTrack/Upsource I have to grab the mouse again :'(.

> Vimium these days does not work when a page hasn't finished loading and it doesn't work on blank pages (about:blank) or any other "system page" (like the preferences or addons).

While the new limitations in WebExtensions can be limiting, these in particular don't sound insurmountable.

Firstly, while I haven't looked into Vimium's sourcecode (yet) there's no reason in my mind it shouldn't work while page is loading. Unless there's some Firefox bugs (VERY possible), the manifest `run-at: document-start` enables this. Other extensions make ample use of run-at and it has worked perfectly in my experience: things like Violentmonkey even expose it via their own API in the form of `@run-at` metadata and I haven't experienced any delays triggering that.

System pages are disabled by default but I believe there's an option either in Firefox prefs or in about:config to re-enable them. Inconvenient but not insurmountable.

> While the new limitations in WebExtensions can be limiting, these in particular don't sound insurmountable.

That sounds promising, but I haven't seen anybody solve it with WebExtensions yet. Just tried Vimium in Chromium too. Same problems.

The end user experience is worse than the picture I painted as my list of drawbacks was incomplete.

Here's another one... Say the server is offline or you mistyped a URL and you get to the "Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site." page. You're stuck as your vim shortcuts don't work anymore.

It's like a friend that should just be there, but can't be trusted.

The "Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site." page is considered one of the internal protected pages, so in theory toggling the appropriate setting to allow extensions on those pages should fix that issue.

Just for clarity, those "special" internal pages in the browser have privileged access to some specific user data, so the intent of having extensions off-by-default on them is to ensure extensions don't all have full access to all that data by default. However, this seems similar to extensions being disabled by default in Private Windows, which is easy to toggle, so I really wish they'd make special browser pages as easy to toggle.

Then just use lynx, who needs graphics anyways right? Also, you can switch tabs (ctrl (shift) tab) while loading. There is also an equivalent for pdfs, dont know what more would be required?

I'm a long-time user of Firefox Vim add-ons, but I agree that they just don't cut it any more. The best Vim-based browsing experience is currently offered by Vieb, IMO. It even has robust window-splitting tools, just like Vim.

Compare Qutebrowser's cheatsheet to Vieb's cheatsheet:

Qutebrowser: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/ma...

Vieb: https://vieb.dev/img/cheatsheet.png

Looks cool, but no extension support. So realistically, no. :-/

Vieb does actually support some extensions, though it is currently limited. See here:

https://github.com/Jelmerro/Vieb/issues/130

Thanks, I will follow this closely. Give me extensions and vim keybindings and I'm ready to give up Tree Style Tab.

FYI Qutebrowser is has a pretty good ad-blocker since 2.0

> Since version 2.0.0, if the Python adblock library is available, it will be used to integrate Brave’s Rust adblocker library for improved adblocking, based on ABP-like filter lists (such as EasyList). If that library is unavailable or on older versions of qutebrowser, a simpler built-in ad blocker is used instead. It takes /etc/hosts-like lists and thus is only able to block entire hosts.

You just need optional dependancy https://pypi.org/project/adblock/

Yes, but uBlock Origin is not only an adblocker. I can enter the element picker mode and remove parts of web pages that bother me. I use this a lot. Also, I have a hard time surfing without Tree Style Tab.

I'm using Vimium, there are some limitations but everything is much much faster than not using it and makes for a much better interaction with the browser.

I use Vimium too (when I'm not using Waterfox with VimFX) but any vim shortcut addon will be a shadow of its former self as a WebExtension.

Hi, I'm the maintainer/"janitor keeping the lights on" for VimFx. It still works on up-to-date Firefox versions, as long as you copy a litte bit of javascript in Firefox' install directory[1].

> Vimium these days does not work when a page hasn't finished loading and it doesn't work on blank pages (about:blank) or any other "system page"

This is the single thing that makes the (current) Webextension framework unusable for such extensions, and the reason I keep working on VimFx.

[1]: https://git.gir.st/LegacyFox.git

Thank you! As I mention further down in the conversation, I use VimFX with Waterfox Current alongside Firefox. I'd rather just use Firefox though. I've been staring at those LegacyFox instruction more than one time. Being lazy I've just continued using Waterfox. Using LegacyFox means I have to build/make it after every update of Firefox, right?

> Using LegacyFox means I have to build/make it after every update of Firefox, right?

Nope! Installing once is enough.

As long as you're upgrading in-place (which you probably do), it will stay persistent, since Legacyfox doesn't overwrite files provided by Firefox.

Vimium-FF was among the first Vim extensions for Firefox post-XUL, and is by far the most popular. It's from the same author (and has the same codebase / github repository) as the Vimium extension originally released on Chrome.

Vimium C was forked off of that in 2014 and seems to be targeted towards Chinese users, with added support for the Chinese language. The Github readme does hint towards performance improvements, but doesn't provide much more detail. It also seems to have a new tab override feature, and a vimium-compatible fork of the Firefox PDF viewer, and a few other miscellaneous features.

Searching using Vimium-FF was broken for me for almost an year. I kept waiting for it to be fixed until my patience ran out and I switched to Vimium C and it worked fine.

The author of Vimium C also raised a PR and it looks like it was finally merged but I don't think I'm going back to Vimium-FF now.

https://github.com/philc/vimium/pull/3801

I have been using tridactyl for the better part of three years now and it's pretty great. It has a feature similar to DDG bang search, where you can add your own search prefixes to search any site. The "hinting" is also very powerful and scriptable. I have used vimium in the past and it never clicked with me as well as tridactyl.

Yes, I agree. I'm still using Tridactyl on Firefox. I also have Vimium on Chrome, but I don't like it as much.

Vim fans might find qutebrowser[1][2] interesting. It's a minimalistic, WebKit-based browser with Vim-like key bindings.

[1] https://qutebrowser.org/

[2] https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser

My issue with it, as others have pointed out, is the lack of extensions ecosystem. It's painful how locked in we really are.

I have been using vimium-c for the past few months, it was game changing for me. It is true though that sometimes I need to hit the occasional ctrl-w to close an unmanaged tab and f5 to refresh a page the plug in didn't load on. The best feature for me is the omnibar though, shortcuts like ctrl-b to search through bookmarks. Can't imagine using the browser without it.

I wish for a Firefox fork that support Qutebrowser style navigation natively instead of those barely functional extension...

I love the vi approach to text editing and have been using it in my daily work for 20 years now -- 10 years in Vim, 10 in Emacs, thanks to evil-mode -- and I have no intention to switch to anything else. However, I tried Vimium and other vi-like UIs for web browsers on multiple occasions but surprisingly it never stuck even though it seems so logical to use it for that as well. Eventually I realized that I actually enjoy taking an occasional break from the vi system and using the mouse for a bit. It's relaxing. The other thing is that web browsing as a task is so different from text editing than many vi concepts do not translate 1-to-1 and there's just too much new stuff that one needs to learn to make it work for web browsing. As a result the cognitive and muscle memory savings are really not that big.

I'm a happy user of vim vixen for quite a while now: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/

I use vimium (or was it vimium C?) on a chromium browser. My biggest bugbear with vimium is that it doesn't work in the browser's native pdf viewer. PDF viewer for vimium C exists but its definitely not as good as the native viewer (better rendering, allows annotating and saving etc).

My browsing consists mostly of pdfs so it makes the whole vimium experience pretty moot.

Also many modern websites have weird scrollbars, or the scrolling content is not the actual body but some div inside the page, and vimium doesn't seem to handle that well

> My browsing consists mostly of pdfs so it makes the whole vimium experience pretty moot.

This is so strange, what are you doing that is mostly in pdfs?

So many things. Academia lives in pdf-land as do many governments.

As the other person said, universities publish majority of their notes as pdfs, very little academic material exists in html. Also papers are still entirely accessed as pdfs through e-libraries

got it, makes sense. For this usecase, it almost makes sense to use IE because they still have the adobe acrobat plugin which imo is the gold standard of pdf reader, annotating.

Not a solution to your problem, but tangential. Have you tried Okular? I used to hate working with PDFs before I discovered Okular. It is the KDE PDF reader.

Will give it a look, thanks! But my guess is I will still stick with the browser inbuilt pdf viewer because most pdfs I view are accessed via url and are not downloaded. It would be too large a context switch to have 2 separate pdf viewers

Have been using Vimium C for some time and even sponsored because I cannot imagine using Firefox without it. I love the way you can customise everything, although am not sure how that compares to other Vim-like extensions. The developer is also very responsive and helpful, providing work-arounds and quickfixes when needed.

I always had a way better experience with the tridactyl plugin for FF. Because of my corporate machine I was forced to use chromium/edge and tried Vimium C but it does not compare in terms of features/keybindings. Sadly there seems to be no alternative for chrome/edge.

Tridactyl is terribly slow for me.

I've been using Surfing Keys on both FF and Chrome for awhile and it's been my favorite vim-like so far.

https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys

If you're on Safari, Vimari is great: https://github.com/televator-apps/vimari

Reply on news.ycombinator.com