Vimium was my introduction to software engineering :) I contributed a bunch of code to it back in 2011-2012. Glad to see it still being in use!
I'm quite proud of the little test I wrote to figure out which DOM APIs could be used to detect the visibility of different kinds of elements, in order that we could display link hints correctly: https://github.com/philc/vimium/blob/master/test_harnesses/v...
How fun! I'm also quite proud of another contribution, also related to detecting visibility, but this time with `document.elementFromPoint` to filter out elements completely covered by other ones :)
(I'm one of the authors) Love seeing this on HN today! It seems to get some front page attention every couple of years. Thank you everyone for the encouragement!
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for your work on Vimium. I have a lot of RSI issues from using a mouse and Vimium has been incredibly helpful in mitigating those.
I think it's fair to say that between Vimium and a windows manager on OSX I've cut my mouse actions by 90%.
Your work has had a profoundly positive impact on my life and I'm very grateful.
Thank you for your excellent work! I have some RSI issues and try not to use the mouse as much as possible. Vimium helps me avoid wear and tear every single day. I love it and install it immediately on any new Chrome instance.
(I am about to use it to press the "reply" button to submit this comment. It's fantastic.)
I once used Vimium and some bug caused the extension to permanently close my hard-earned ~500 tab collection. So while I feel like I lost a lot, I've never felt so much at peace since either.
That used to be my solution for managing tabs in chrome. Every few months it would just crash, I'd lose all my tab, and I'd think "probably for the best". Now chrome is a lot more stable :/.
It's interesting, because i've asked many people who have massive tab counts this same question, and it seems the overwhelming answer is that bookmarks are harder to manage than tabs.
It takes more time to bookmark a link, than it is to open it in a new tab. The positioning of the tab is an indication of approx. when that tab had been opened, and the other tabs near it is likely similar in subject matter, or is related somehow.
It acts as a queue to be processed as well.
And for a lot of browsers, the auto-preloading means you can have the tab "saved" and you can view it, even if it took long time to load. It's a form of "offline" viewing.
If bookmarks can achieve _all_ of the above, without having the need for the user to do anything extra, it would actually replace tabs. But so far, i've not seen anyone switch.
As someone guilty of same (I've got just over half that many tabs open now: 273), I might be able to explain.
Links rot. If I see something on the interwebs that I want to store or remember, I usually copy the pertinent information somewhere else. Be that Anki, or org-mode, or somewhere else. I leave the tab open until I get the free time to go back and copy the information somewhere.
Looking at my open-longest tabs, it seems I've got some Magento documentation open from last summer. I should go clean that up. )) If these were bookmarks, I would absolutely _never_ get around to filing the information away in a useful place.
it is. i am one of those who have atleast 100 tab on any workday, more on my personal system. i also use bookmark service like raindrop that have tagging, etc than simple folders.
Main reason for keeping tags are they are a constant reminder of topics to look into. Kinda like postits on your monitor. If I put them away using bookmarks I often forget about them and neder get to them. I have folders with hundreds of links I wanted to look a year back and still haven't.
I do clean out tabs occasionally when I am done with a topic but I mostly only bookmark when having to shutdown the system.
Holy shit... 500 tabs? I thought I was bad about accumulating tabs but had no idea ~500 was even possible. I'm trying to even but I literally can't--You might say "I literally can't even".
I have 7-8000 on one machine, multiple thousands on at least two others. Session Buddy + either Auto Tab Discard or The Marvellous Suspender means I don't lose any even in crashes and it doesn't use too much RAM.
I think this may have been this issue[0], which was fixed in [1]. Seems like the limit has crept up from 3 to 25 at some point in the last decade-ish, but in theory it should be undoable with 25X (or by mashing X to undo as many x commands as required).
[0]: https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/1126
[1]: https://github.com/philc/vimium/pull/1128
my solution to beat the tab accumulation problem is to have firefox simply close all tabs, clear browsing and download history, clear form and search history, and clear cache upon the user choosing to close the program. if the browser or computer crashes the tabs and everything else still exist. if a site meets your interests, bookmark it. note that cookies remain but are usually cleared periodically. also you can setup a folder of bookmarks, or a new tab page, that you can open up everyday and check the websites you want.
I used Vimium for a while, mainly for the feature of opening links with the keyboard. But I never stuck with it, forgot to use it, because I really don't like the mode-switching and having it default to taking over keyboard input.
Finally found Link Hints, which does only the link opening part, but better (IMO), and with normal keyboard shortcuts. Now I'm constantly using it.
Modeless Keyboard Navigation[0] is a fork of Vimium by an RSI sufferer that doesn't have the mode switching element (but does keep all the other actual features); instead you use Control/Alt + whatever key combinations. Basically it's like Link Hints but with more shortcuts.
I use caret mode, visual selection and P quite often to search for the text in visual selection in a new tab with the preferred search engine. I also like yf for yanking a link to clipboard.
This is the very thing I’ve been looking for since vimac became proprietary (homerow). I was using Shortcat, which is also a proprietary software and I was having a little bit of concern mainly about security, but this software seems to solve the problem. Thank you for sharing.
Is that really practical? In the video it looks not very useful to me as it does not seem to be very efficient. The mouse is so integrated into MacOS it looks hard to efficiently replace it. Are you or is anyone else actually using this regularly?
Also, I think the other mentioned alternatives look quite similar to that regard.
It certainly would be but looking at the options tells me that they're hooking into MacOS's widget libs and on Linux there's just so many. What I get by with to go mouseless is Tridactyl for Firefox, warpd for when I need a pointer, and when I absolutely, positively need a mouse, mouse emulation on QMK keyboards never fails me. I only need it these days for dealing with MacOS outside of my Linux VM. I also use keyd in order to remap keyboard shortcuts.
On linux, you can just install one of the DEs that are keyboard driven. Rat poison is one. I used that with Conkeror (a fully keyboard driven browser with emacs keys) for a long time.
This comes up every once in a while on HN. I've been using vimium for over 10 years now since I did an internship at the same company as the guys who created it. Can't imagine browsing the web without it. Works especially well with HN and those small link targets :)
There's also a free, open source vim style browser called Qutebrowser which you can control like Vim if that's your thing. It works well, also with complicated web sites.
I have been using qutebrowser for some time now and it's pretty nice if you can accept having a browser without UBlock Origin and other extensions ranging from nice-to-have to obligatory. The main advantage and the reason and I can't get myself to switch to Firefox is that it's vim-UX is just flawless. It works amazingly well and is just magnitudes better than any Firefox or Chrome extension that adds vim-UX on top since it's built into the browser natively in qutebrowser.
Maybe I'll switch away some time in the future, but for now the flawless vim-UX, its customizability and my many scripts and custom bindings I've written for it keep my locked in the qutebrowser garden, haha!
> pretty nice if you can accept having a browser without UBlock Origin
Just for potential readers who might not be aware: qutebrowser ships with its own inbuild adblocker though, so you're entirely left adrift in the ad-trashpile that is the Web today. Qutebrowser isn't my daily driver (mainly because I found it a pain to configure), but from my limited experience, the adblocking works pretty well.
Qutebrowser seem to have some built-in support for adblocking, have you used that? I'm curious how it works.
Tried it before, long long time ago, but found it to complex. But now after using Vimium for a while Qutebrowser actually seems very intuitive and not hard at all.
+1 my thoughts exactly. It would be so nice if Firefox allowed tridactyl full keyboard control. With qutebrowser, having a proper control mode and an insert mode that work everywhere makes it so much easier to navigate.
I love qutebrowser and use it daily (and donate to the compiler), mostly on Linux but also on Windows.
Here are some of my headaches that force me to use Chrome/Firefox anyway sometimes, if anyone has answers to these I am very interested to hear them.
* Can't save passwords / autofill (for accounts I don't particularly care about)
* UI scaling in Windows (for high-res screens) is bad. The web page contents do not scale automatically.
* Does not resolve Teams "secure links" (workaround is to right click teams links instead and copy them, then paste in qutebrowser)
* Twitter videos don't work
* On linux (somehow this works on windows), "accept all cookies" sometimes does not get rid of that prompt. Stack overflow is an example where this happens. Another example is redhat where the prompt does not load for a while [0]
* Clicking something that spawns a box where text can be inserted does not bring me into insert mode. Example [1] (the searchglass). This causes me to close the tab by mistake sometimes by typing 'd'.
Readit News
I'm quite proud of the little test I wrote to figure out which DOM APIs could be used to detect the visibility of different kinds of elements, in order that we could display link hints correctly: https://github.com/philc/vimium/blob/master/test_harnesses/v...
Not sure I'll have much time to work on OSS in the foreseeable future, but it would certainly be nice to work together again.
https://github.com/philc/vimium/pull/2251
I built the custom search engines feature (which I ironically don't use much anymore).
Related: last week I published a very similar extension, but for Google Sheets. https://github.com/philc/sheetkeys
I think it's fair to say that between Vimium and a windows manager on OSX I've cut my mouse actions by 90%.
Your work has had a profoundly positive impact on my life and I'm very grateful.
(I am about to use it to press the "reply" button to submit this comment. It's fantastic.)
Do you have any plans for a Google Docs extension as well? Or do you mostly get by with Vimium there?
It takes more time to bookmark a link, than it is to open it in a new tab. The positioning of the tab is an indication of approx. when that tab had been opened, and the other tabs near it is likely similar in subject matter, or is related somehow.
It acts as a queue to be processed as well.
And for a lot of browsers, the auto-preloading means you can have the tab "saved" and you can view it, even if it took long time to load. It's a form of "offline" viewing.
If bookmarks can achieve _all_ of the above, without having the need for the user to do anything extra, it would actually replace tabs. But so far, i've not seen anyone switch.
Links rot. If I see something on the interwebs that I want to store or remember, I usually copy the pertinent information somewhere else. Be that Anki, or org-mode, or somewhere else. I leave the tab open until I get the free time to go back and copy the information somewhere.
Looking at my open-longest tabs, it seems I've got some Magento documentation open from last summer. I should go clean that up. )) If these were bookmarks, I would absolutely _never_ get around to filing the information away in a useful place.
Main reason for keeping tags are they are a constant reminder of topics to look into. Kinda like postits on your monitor. If I put them away using bookmarks I often forget about them and neder get to them. I have folders with hundreds of links I wanted to look a year back and still haven't.
I do clean out tabs occasionally when I am done with a topic but I mostly only bookmark when having to shutdown the system.
I'm sorry you lost your tabs but congratulations nonetheless.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11828270/how-do-i-exit-v...
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Finally found Link Hints, which does only the link opening part, but better (IMO), and with normal keyboard shortcuts. Now I'm constantly using it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkhints/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/key-jump-keyb...
0: https://handsfreecoding.org/2017/11/22/extensions-now-availa...
Edit: no, but tridactyl is: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
Offtopic:
The section "Declaration for Applicable Regions" from ReadMe, this is the first time I've come across it.
Should it be read as a disclaimer or an opinion?
https://shortcat.app
Also, I think the other mentioned alternatives look quite similar to that regard.
https://github.com/rvaiya/warpdhttps://github.com/rvaiya/keyd
Why in the world are those links side by side?
https://qutebrowser.org/
Maybe I'll switch away some time in the future, but for now the flawless vim-UX, its customizability and my many scripts and custom bindings I've written for it keep my locked in the qutebrowser garden, haha!
Just for potential readers who might not be aware: qutebrowser ships with its own inbuild adblocker though, so you're entirely left adrift in the ad-trashpile that is the Web today. Qutebrowser isn't my daily driver (mainly because I found it a pain to configure), but from my limited experience, the adblocking works pretty well.
Tried it before, long long time ago, but found it to complex. But now after using Vimium for a while Qutebrowser actually seems very intuitive and not hard at all.
Here are some of my headaches that force me to use Chrome/Firefox anyway sometimes, if anyone has answers to these I am very interested to hear them.
* Can't save passwords / autofill (for accounts I don't particularly care about)
* UI scaling in Windows (for high-res screens) is bad. The web page contents do not scale automatically.
* Does not resolve Teams "secure links" (workaround is to right click teams links instead and copy them, then paste in qutebrowser)
* Twitter videos don't work
* On linux (somehow this works on windows), "accept all cookies" sometimes does not get rid of that prompt. Stack overflow is an example where this happens. Another example is redhat where the prompt does not load for a while [0]
* Clicking something that spawns a box where text can be inserted does not bring me into insert mode. Example [1] (the searchglass). This causes me to close the tab by mistake sometimes by typing 'd'.
[0]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... [1]: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates/web-design...