How to control Firefox using Vim keybindings

Vim users stick with Vim in no small part because muscle memory is so powerful — once you’ve learned Vim’s keybindings, it’s possible to be extremely productive in Vim without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. If you’d like to imbue Firefox with Vim power, embrace the Vimperator extension. Vimperator turns Firefox into a no-nonsense, modal Web browser.

The Vimperator 0.4.1 extension is available on Mozdev.org. To install the extension you can download it to your hard drive or just click on the most recent version. You may need to add the site to your allowed list of sites for installing extensions. Firefox will display a bar at the top of the page if the site isn’t on the allowed list — just follow the prompts.

When you restart Firefox after installing Vimperator, you’ll notice that its menu bar, location bar, and the status bar have disappeared. Vimperator replaces the default status bar with a custom status bar that shows the command line and the current URL, and an indicator that shows what tab you’re in and where you’re at in relation to the length of the page. For instance, if you have five tabs open and you’re viewing the second tab, the status bar will display [2/5]. If you’re at the top of the page, it will display Top, or Bot at the bottom of the page. If you’re at some spot in the middle, it will display an approximate percentage.

What if you just can’t live without one of the Firefox toolbars that Vimperator hides? No problem. As in Vim, you can enter commands in Vimperator’s “last line mode” by typing : and the command. To modify the guioptions settings and make the location and menu bars visible, type this command, then press Enter:

:set guioptions=mT

You should see the location bar (T) and menu bar (m) again. To bring back the bookmark bar, you could add b, and s for the original Firefox status bar.

Navigation

Vim and vi users will take to most of the Vimperator mappings right away. The standard vi/Vim movement keys work as you’d expect: k moves up, j moves down, h moves to the right, and l moves to the left. To scroll to the top of the page, use gg, and to move to the end of the page, use G.

If you go to a page, like Google, that puts the cursor in a text field, you’ll be in insert mode rather than command mode. In that case, if you try to use navigation keys or start a search, you’ll just end up typing text in the text field. You can press Tab to move the cursor from the text field, or Esc to move into command mode.

What about browsing? Vimperator has a full set of commands that will help you navigate from the keyboard almost effortlessly. I won’t reproduce the entire list, but here’s a sample to get you started:

• gt or Ctrl-n: Go to the next tab.
• gT or Ctrl-p: Go to the previous tab.
• gh: Go to your home page.
• gH: Go to your home page, in a new tab.
• gu: Go up. For example, would take you from http://www.example.com/blog/ to http://www.example.com/.
• H: Go to the previous page in your browser history.
• L: Go to the next page in your browser history.
• :o http://www.example.com/: Open http://www.example.com/.
• :o search term: Use the default search engine to search for a search term.
• :o filename: Open a local file using Firefox.
• :q: Close the current tab. If only one tab is open, exit Firefox.
• zi: Zoom in. Increases text size by 25% on the page that has focus.
• zI: Zoom in by 100% on the page that has focus.
• zo: Zoom out. Decreases text size by 25% on the page that has focus.
• zO: Zoom out by 100% on the page that has focus.
• zz: Used alone zz will reset the page to 100%. Used with a count, it will set the text size to any value between 25% and 500%. So, 105zz will set the text size to 105% of normal.

Vimperator also sports a few Hint modes, where links have a yellow label containing a shortcut to use the link. This is much like Konqueror’s feature for keyboard navigation.

To enter QuickHint mode, press f. Each link should have a label, and you can activate the link by entering its shortcut. So, if you’re on a page with a dozen or so links, you’ll have hints labeled A, B, C, D, etc. If you press a, you’ll browse to that link. If you press A, the link will be opened in a new tab in the background.

But wait, there’s more! You can also use ; to enter what’s called an ExtendedHint mode. You’ll see the same labels, but when you enter the shortcut, you’ll just highlight the label. Once you’ve selected a link, you can use y to copy the URL, or Y to copy the text description of the URL.

Browsing with Vimperator

One of Vimperator’s most powerful features is the way it lets you handle Firefox history. If you use the :history command, it will pull up the most recent 10 pages you’ve browsed. This includes local files as well as regular pages.

The default for history is to bring up only 10 pages, which isn’t too useful if you’re looking for something from two days ago. You can combine :history with a search term to find URLs or page names that match what you’re looking for. Let’s say you’re trying to find pages you’ve browsed with “craigslist” in the title or URL. Use :history craigslist and Vimperator will display a preview window at the bottom of the browser window with the most recent 10 pages that match “craigslist” in the title or URL.

To browse to a page, double-click on the history entry you want in the preview window. (Yes, right now there’s no way to get there from the keyboard.) To close the search result, type :pc, or :pclose, if that’s easier to remember.

What about using bookmarks? To add a bookmark, use the :bmadd command, and use :bmdel url to delete a bookmark. You need to be very specific when you’re using :mbdel, as it will delete any bookmarks that match a URL.

The :bm command displays bookmarks. Use :bm! to open a page with all the bookmarks displayed, and a search bar at the top of the page. According to the help text, :bm expression should allow you to search through your bookmarks, but this just returns an error for me, so I suspect it’s not fully implemented yet.

Searching

In Firefox, Ctrl-f pops open the search dialog near the status bar. Using Vimperator, Ctrl-f works as it would in Vim — it moves you one “page” forward. The standard Vim search mapping, /, works in Vimperator — though the backward search mapping (?) is not recognized.

Once you’ve entered a search term, you’ll be taken to its first instance (if there is one). Unlike in Vim, you’ll need to press Esc to escape from the search field. To look for more instances of a search term, use n to move forward through the search, and N to move backward.

The search term is applied across all tabs, so if you search for XYZ in your first tab, and then use gt to move to your second tab, you can still search that page for the same search term.

Getting help

Just as in Vim, you can get help for Vimperator by typing :help at any time. This command will bring up a local copy of the Vimperator help document, which covers all the options, mappings, and commands that are used with Vimperator.

You can also, in some cases, go straight to the help for a specific mapping. For example, if you want to see the reference for the :open command, use :help :open. The problem with this is that you need to know the command you want to use. It’s fine as a reference, but not so good if you’re not sure what command to use to do something.

Quitting

When you’re ready to exit Firefox, you can do so in a number of ways — just as you can in Vim. Using :q will exit Firefox if you’re on the last tab. Otherwise, it closes the tab you’re in.

Using :qall or ZQ will exit Firefox and clear the session history. If you want to quit Firefox, but restart it later with the same session, you can use ZZ instead.

If you want to restart Firefox immediately, you can use the :restart command.

Setting options

We’ve already covered using :set to change some of Vimperator’s options. The Vimperator help document includes a full list of options that can be set.

You can also set your defaults using a configuration file. To do this, create a file called .vimperatorrc under your home directory. Vimperator will check for this when it starts. The advantage to using a configuration file is that it can reset options when Firefox starts. For instance, if you don’t like having the Firefox toolbar open, you can set that in your .vimperatorrc and make sure it’s not open when you restart Firefox — even if you had opened it during a previous session.

What you can and can’t do with Vimperator’s configuration file isn’t well-documented yet, but you can use an example Vim syntax configuration that provides syntax highlighting for editing the .vimperatorrc file. Vimperator’s developer, Martin Stubenschrott, has indicated that users should wait for Vimperator 0.5 to do any scripting, as he’s planning to change and document the API at that time. You should also be able to use :map functions at that time.

Playing nice with others

Vimperator is an excellent extension, but it doesn’t play well with all of Firefox’s features or extensions at this time, or with Web sites that have navigation keys that conflict with Vimperator’s mappings.

For example, when using Vimperator, the subscribe feed button in the location bar doesn’t seem to work, even when the location bar is set to be visible using guioptions. This is also true of the reload button, which is grayed out with Vimperator enabled. The default Firefox shortcut for reload, F5, does not work, though you can use r to refresh the page. Unfortunately, Vimperator doesn’t have a shortcut for the subscription feature, so it’s not possible to easily subscribe to a new feed using Firefox’s subscription feature while Vimperator is running.

Since Vimperator hides the default status bar, any extensions that utilize the status bar are also affected. Google’s Notebook extension, for instance, is not disabled, but you can’t open the notebook by clicking the Notebook icon in the status bar. You can open it from the Firefox context menu if you use the Note This menu entry to add a note — the Google Notebook pop-up will still work fine, it just doesn’t have a button in the status bar. Note that you can restore the default Firefox status bar using :set guioptions=s and it will appear on top of the Vimperator status bar.

Occasionally, Vimperator also conflicts with keybindings set by a Web page. I thought, briefly, that I would have to choose between Google Reader and Vimperator, because the navigation keys for Vimperator and Google Reader conflict. However, Vimperator has a solution for keybinding conflicts. You can press I to ignore Vimperator’s keybindings, and Esc when you’re ready to re-enter Vimperator mode. This doesn’t fix glitches like the subscription button, but at least it lets you use applications like the feed reader without having to uninstall or disable Vimperator.

In general, Vimperator’s vi-like mappings integrate surprisingly well with Firefox. For hard-core Vim junkies who hate having to use the mouse except when absolutely necessary, Vimperator makes Firefox more enjoyable.