nullprogram.com/blog/2009/04/03/
I recently learned about an excellent Firefox add-on called Vimperator,
which I have been using for a few days now. It creates an extremely
efficient Vim-like interface to Firefox. One of the main functions
is to be able to browse completely mouseless.
Why mouseless? Because the mouse is a bad input device for many uses
of a computer. It's a good choice for many games, like first-person
shooters, or graphic design, like Inkscape or GIMP. But for tasks like
text editing, word processing, and data entry, the mouse one of the
worst kinds of input device. The less you touch the mouse, the better.
Vimperator's argument is that the browser is better as a pure keyboard
interface.
I am an Emacs person myself, which I use for text editing, file
management, and IRC, but I appreciate the vi/Vim interface and accept
it as being almost as good. Most of my vi experience actually
comes from NetHack and Less. My main use
for vi is editing my Debian sources.list so I can install Emacs.
Vimperator removes your toolbar, menu bar, and address bar. Then it
transforms the status bar into the standard Vim status lines. This is
because you don't need any of this stuff anymore with the Vim
interface. It's traded for more browser real estate. This also
creates the fun situation of watching your friends try to use your
browser. At first, it really is pretty disorienting.
There is handy built-in documentation, found by pressing F1 or calling
the :help command. You'll want to read through these
before trying to do anything.
My problem right now is breaking my old Firefox keyboard muscle
memory. Before Vimperator, my browsing was already fairly mouseless. I
used keyboard shortcuts for everything. I had the Mouseless
Browsing add-on installed, and occasionally used. When not using
Mouseless Browsing, it worked out well because my right hand did the
mouse, while most of the keyboard shortcuts could easily be performed
with my left hand (C-tab, C-S-tab,
C-t, C-w).
I think Vimperator has the potential to be even more efficient than
that.
Probably one of the biggest adjustments is following links without a
mouse. Like the Mouseless Browsing add-on, Vimperator assigns numbers
to the links to be typed out. It is less intrusive though, because it
doesn't reformat the page to show the numbers. It has a "hint" mode
you go into for that. This mode displays the numbers over the links as
red markers.
But even better than that, you don't generally even need those
numbers. You can enter hint mode and begin typing the type of the link
out. As soon as you reach a unique string prefix, it follows the
link. This is the primary way I follow links, and I started doing this
completely by accident. I wasn't even aware this was possible until I
did it. Vimperator was completely natural in this respect.
Probably my favorite feature so far is automatic page advancement. I
use these all the time now. One set of commands is C-a
and C-x. These increment and decrement the last number in
a URL, handy for those annoying multi-page articles. If they number
the pages in the URL, this should handle it automatically. The other
form of page turning is [[ and ]]. These
search for links labeled "next", ">", "prev", "previous", and
"<" and follow them. This works in Google searches and many
web comics.
A potential use for macros is quick data scraping. You can write a
macro to automatically perform a series of actions, like save the
current page and move the next one, and have them repeat a number of
times. It could also help in rapidly filling out the same form over
and over, leaving only the CAPTCHA for manual input, if you were up to
something mischievous.
For example, here is a macro to open in a new tab the first result of
a Google search on the current page, then move to the next page. If
you repeat it, it will open the first result on page 1, then the first
result on page 2, and so on.
q s F 2 8 ] ] q
Note, the "28" may be different for you. To open the first result on
the next 15 search result pages,
1 5 @ s
It is pretty cool watching it work away.
It's not perfect, though. Like Vim, you can prefix commands with
numbers to repeat them, but this won't work with many commands, such
as the page turning one above. You can get around it sometimes by
placing the command in a macro.
Also, Vimperator still requires a mouse for many actions, like saving
images. The worst part about it is these actions cannot be used as
part of a macro. Hopefully Vimperator will improve in the future and
fix this.
Give it a shot sometime. Like learning a good text editor for the
first time, after you are set up, move your mouse out of reach so you
are forced to use the keyboard. It slows you down in the short run,
but you will be very fast later on down the road.