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Comment by tastysandwich | Hacker News Reader

I used Vimperator on Firefox about 10 years ago. Back then it was fantastic, but I think the add-on environment has changed in FF (WebExtensions) since then and add-ons aren't as powerful.

I've used Vimium on Chrome. Every few years I get excited, install it, feel 10x more productive, and then a few days later uninstall it.

As I recall, it doesn't work on the New Tab page. It doesn't work if the address bar is in focus. I believe you have to wait for the page to fully load before you can use it.

Most annoyingly, a lot of websites have custom keyboard shortcuts, so you have to blacklist them in the Vimium config. Eg Gmail, Miro. Then you need to remember you can't use Vimium on them.

None of this is their fault in any way, of course. But it does make Vimium a bit annoying to use for me anyway.

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> Most annoyingly, a lot of websites have custom keyboard shortcuts, so you have to blacklist them in the Vimium config.

No, you just need to enter insert mode. Hit `i`, then all the keyboard shortcuts for the site work. Exit insert mode with escape or ctrl+[.

:mind-unrectifiably-blown-emoji:

Thanks for this, this changes everything. Namely, I can re-enable most commands that I've globally disabled. Who woulda thought the path to enlightenment would be to simply RTFM.

Well, I never want the site's keybindings anyways. They are without a fault, always worse than the general-purpose navigation offered by the extension (I use Surfingkeys, but it's the same idea).

Unfortunately, the extension cannot always overpower site's key-bindings, and that's where it sucks.

However, there's one exception to that rule: every now and then I need to work with a VNC in the browser, and in that specific case Surfingkeys takes over and makes it unusable. Well... it's annoying, but, really all it takes is clicking the extension's icon next to the address bar, and then clicking it again once I'm done with the VNC.

And yes, not having access to browser's chrome (that the address bar and new tab etc.) is a disadvantage that's due to how browsers currently work is impossible to work around.

Extensions do offer a kind of substitute, but it can never be 100% (i.e. Surfingkeys have a way to input new URL or edit current URL w/o interacting with the address bar, or a way to select a tab w/o interacting with browser's chrome, but if you happen on a page like settings or something similar, the extension cannot work there).

You can use <Alt-s> to disable SurfingKeys for that specific website instead of disabling it globally.

There isn't any specific site to disable. It's just an IP that was allocated randomly to my cluster on the VPN I'm connected to. But, sometimes they also have domain names because I need that. Anyways, my point was: it's not that much of a burden really.

I see, just wanted to help if you weren't aware of the shortcut. It took me a while to discover it on Firefox because <Alt-s> is used to toggle fingerprint resistance. That's why I remapped it to '<Ctrl-.>' in my setup.

    // privacy.resistFingerprinting breaks alt keybindings
    api.map('<Ctrl-.>', '<Alt-s>');
    api.unmap('<Alt-s>');

SurfingKeys remembers disabled websites so it can be a time-saver.

What I have noticed is that the bottleneck in editor vs. browser is different, which explains why I don't use Vimium anymore either.

In the editor speed matters: speed is a bottleneck. For example, if AI comes in writes a paragraph based on the function title, "bubble_sort_array", that's great, because now I've sliced 2 minutes off the 3 minutes that would ordinarily take.

But in the browser, time is cheap; in fact, that's largely why I used the browser, to luxuriate in the time it takes to, say, read an article, or write a long comment. I'm there to take it slow, to escape the tyranny of efficiency. So when I'm there to relax, shaving 4 seconds off a 10 minute reading time is irrelevant.

So I use shortcuts in my editor, but not my browser.

I think i installed some other tab page so it works in new tabs for me.

For address bar being focussed, a tab will take you to to the page content.

The one thing I find most annoying (which isn't vimium's fault) is the lack of j/k scrolling on pdfs.

I have vimium configured to just use f, F, and alt+j and k to move between tabs. That's all I really need and it doesn't tend to conflict with the web sites I use.

I can't let vimium go even as an emacs user ;)

As someone else replied, insert mode.

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