A few months ago I wrote about my first steps with Vim. Now I can finally say: I am faster with Vim than I ever have been with RubyMine 🎉 As soon as you get used to the Vim key bindings you demand them from every other program as well. In my mail program for example I try doing the most things with shortcuts now, too.
And recently I started using the Chrome Plugin Vimium. It makes surfing the web much more efficient if you are used to the Vim key bindings already.
The equivalent plugin for Firefox is VimFx.
Here are my top 3 Vimium features
J/K lets you go to the previous/next tab (Way easier to type compared to <Ctrl-Tab>/<Ctrl-Shift-Tab>).
T gives you an fzf-like tab switcher. With <Ctrl-j/k> you can go up and down in the results (like in fzf). Similarly, o gives you an fzf-like menu for your history and bookmarks.
f/F gives you letters in overlays for every link of the page and opens the link in the same tab/new tab.
Vimium has even more features. So check it out :)
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Top comments (12)
Thanks for posting this. Being a VIM fan and after installing the plugin I can see the gain in using this. Surely, like VIM there will be a learning curve with this as well. But surely over the long run vimium will save time.
I recently did the same thing! I eventually switched to cVim, which I like a little better, but both are solid plugins.
What's the main advantage of cVim for you? :)
The biggest thing for me was the search, which supports regex and works better in general. I think I couldn't figure out how to make chromium do case insensitive searches.
cVim also has a cleaner approach to customizations, though I haven't customized much yet.
I use cVim too! :D
Did you try Surfingkeys? I like it a lot. I think it is a lot more customizable and have some extra feature. You can even bind a key stroke to a Javascript function.
This plugin looks pretty cool, too. I have to check it out :)
Been using it for a while, same as vim plugins for some IDEs, and found myself kicking them out again after a while. While I still love and massively use vim whenever working on a terminal through an ssh session, it somehow feels strange to me to use this mode of operation in any other environment... ;)
I think the problem might be that we don't give us the same time and focus to learn the key bindings in any other in environment. When I started with vim I forced myself not to use the mouse or the arrow keys. Of course it is slow in the beginning, but if you stick to it you will get faster eventually. So if I don't force myself to use the Vimium key bindings, I will never be more effective and stop using it.
What's your thought on this?
Yes, maybe you're right. Looking at how I use IDEs (Eclipse, VS Code, Atom), I found myself making excessive use of both keyboard and mouse for editing and navigating. Maybe I just should give it a try to only use keyboard for this and see how it works.
Then again, actually, I always sort of found the absence of mouse as working input device especially in ssh terminals more of an issue to be resolved rather than a feature and so I made use of vim to be as fast as possible under these circumstances. Would be interesting to see if leaving out a mouse on an X11 user interface will leave you same as fast. ;)
I've tried my fair share of vim-adaptations to other tools, like vimium for chrome or vim keybindings in IntelliJ, and have always been left wonting.
In the case of vimium, the last time I tried it, I had to disable it on a few sites due to their homegrown keybindings for common actions (e.g., github). It seems to be a race condition for who can register to capture the keydown event first. I'm not sure it works out in my favor, as a user.
I ended up disabling it permanently since it degraded my browsing experience so much. I like it in concept, but it didn't work out so well in practice.
I make use of this too.. Awesome tool