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Comment by ashwinsundar | Hacker News Reader

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ashwinsundar

I installed Vimium a few months ago and haven't looked back -> https://vimium.github.io/

Mouseless as well for navigating anywhere on the computer without a mouse -> https://mouseless.click/

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For macOS users, I highly recommend ShortCat: https://shortcat.app/

ShortCat uses the accessibility API to put Vimium-style keyboard links on buttons and text fields in any app.

I find that Vimium works faster in Firefox than using ShortCat to click around websites, so I use both, but ShortCat technically should do everything (clicking-wise) that Vimium does.

Shortcat has a ~second delay before showing links, homerow (https://www.homerow.app) is faster.

I wonder if it has to do with accessibility API thread locking. I found a different extension I used to emulate an i3 style environment suffered when I used the Unity game engine. It ended up being limitations of the accessibility API.

Could be, but there is another app that does the same thing faster so there must be some optimizations available.

This delay is configurable. The delay is there so you can actually type a bit before the UI pops up, and then the UI will be filtered to just your selection.

The configuration lies. Even with "Show hints" set to "Immediately", there is a long delay. Feels like half a second on M1 Pro.

Fair, fair—it's default is longer, so dialing it down made it feel zippy by comparison.

I'm trying out Homerow and I'm really liking it! Thanks for mentioning it. I might end up sticking with it actually.

I wish this was paid or open source…

As I understand it, a payment system is in the works. I would gladly fork over some cash to support ShortCat. Looks like someone recommended Homerow, which appears to be pretty comparable to ShortCat, and it has a one-time purchase option.

ShortCat is an incredible recommendation, thank you!

omg this is amazing. shortcat that is

i <3 tridactyl [0] - are there upsides to vimium i'm missing?

[0] https://tridactyl.xyz/about/

edit: added url

Vimium has better smooth scrolling. I really, really want to use Tridactyl, but I just can't stomach their smooth-scrolling implementation.

Ha! I actually switched from Vimium to Tridactyl partly because I prefer the rough, snappy scrolling. It felt much more like the ctrl+d ctrl+u navigation in VIM.

I never started with Vimium (was using an even less known one), also in part because I find smooth scrolling disorienting. Also on Tridactyl now, once someone on here showed me the hintfiltermode, hintchars, and hintnames settings to get the old Vimperator behavior (which I also find so much better than any current defaults):

  set hintfiltermode vimperator-reflow
  set hintchars 1234567890
  set hintnames numeric

Lets you type the words in links, and the hints filter down to only matches. If you go all the way to 1 match it automatically picks it, but as the hints filter down the numeric labels also reset - so there are no gaps betweeen the numbers and it's almost always between 1 and 5 to get the link I want.

Tridactyl is only available for Firefox unfortunately

Probably not, use whatever makes you happy!

I no longer use vimium, I use vimium-c, but these should work in both, add these to your custom mappings - you'd thank me later:

    map gf LinkHints.activateOpenInNewTab count=999999
    map go LinkHints.click direct="focused" mode="newtab-active"
    map gb LinkHints.click direct="focused" mode="newtab"

    map gm toggleMuteTab

I would typically do something like this - I'd press "/", search for an occurence, it navigates to one, if it's a link, pressing "go" - opens it in a new tab, "gb" - opens it without switching to it. I promise you, you'd love this.

Share your interesting options.

Vimium, (neo)vim and vim key bindings have been life-changing.

i use i3wm so there are various keybindings you can use. for mouseless stuff i use xdotool to move the pointer in 16 or 64 pixel increments using the keyboard. if i could toggle the mouse pointer on and off i would.

You can use unclutter to hide the cursor after a period of inactivity. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unclutter

Warpd is really cool in that context. (https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd)

First, hint mode: https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd#hint-mode-alt-meta-x

switching to normal mode: https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd#normal-mode-alt-meta-c

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