I’m a huge Vim nerd, for hopefully obvious reasons, but one often finds themselves in need of a web browser. I use Chrome, and it has a plugin that I don’t think enough people know about called Vimium.
Vimium does exactly what you’re hoping for—it lets you use Vim commands in Chrome.
There are lots of commands available, but these are my favorites:
j
— to scroll slightly up
k
— to scroll slightly down
d
— scroll half a page down
u
— to scroll up half a page
r
— to reload the page
yy
— to copy the URL
/
— to search on the page (followed by n
and N
)
T
— to search within tabs
Use cases
If you only have a fragment in the clipboard, P
will search for that fragment instead.
- External URLs — You get sent a URL from somewhere like Messages, Signal, or Email, and you copy it to your clipboard. Simply
⌘-TAB
to get to Chrome and then pressP
. This will open that URL in a new tab for you. So it’s 1) open a tab, 2) paste, and 3) press enter—all in one keystroke. - Searching Tabs — You can configure Chrome to search within tabs but that requires that you get to the URL bar, search, and find your result. Using
T
you can do it from anywhere and the results are quite good. - Scrolling — Reading a page with
j
andk
is very familiar since I spend a good amount of time in Vim. - Finding Text — Similar to scrolling, using
/
,n
, andN
to find, find next instance, and find previous instance are far more warm and fuzzy than⌘-f
and clicking through results.
Summary
Vimium is a sleeper of an extension. If you’re a Vim user it brings some familiarity to your other most-used application—the browser.
I hope this helps a fellow Vim user get more efficiency and comfort from Chrome.