Vim Vixen

Vim Vixen is a Firefox add-on which allows you to navigate with keyboard on the browser. Firefox started to support WebExtensions API and will stop supporting add-ons using legacy APIs from version 57. For this reason, many legacy add-ons do not work on Firefox 57. Vim Vixen is a new choice for Vim users since Vim Vixen uses the WebExtensions API.

Basic usage

Key-maps

The key-maps are configurable in the add-ons preferences by navigating to about:addons and selecting "Extensions". The default mappings are as follows:

Console

• :: open console
• o, t, w: open a page in current tab, new tab, or new window
• O, T, W: similar to o, t, w, but that contains current URL
• b: Select tabs by URL or title

Tabs

• !d: delete pinned tab
• u: reopen close tab
• r: reload current tab
• R: reload current tab without cache

Navigation

• f: start following links in the page
• H: go back in history
• L: go forward in history
• [[, ]]: find prev or next links and open it
• gu: go to parent directory
• gU: go to root directory
• gi: focus first input

Misc

• y: copy URL in current tab
• p: open clipbord's URL in current tab
• P: open clipbord's URL in new tab
• Shift+Esc: enable or disable the add-on in current tab.
• /: start to find a keyword in the page
• n: find next keyword in the page
• N: find prev keyword in the page

Console commands

Vim Vixen provides a console for ex-style commands similar to Vimperator.

Open the console with :. Or start it with initial values using o, t, or w.

:open command

The :open command operates two different ways, depending on the parameter. When the parameter is a URL, that URL is opened in the current tab.

:open http://github.com/ueokande

Otherwise, the current tab will open a search page with the supplied string (defaults to Google).

:open How to contribute to Vim-Vixen

To use a search engine other than the default, specify which search engine to use as the first parameter.

:open yahoo How to contribute to Vim-Vixen

To adjust the search engine default and add/remove search engines, see the search engines section.

:tabopen command

Open a URL or search keywords by search engine in new tab.

:winopen command

Open a URL or search keywords by search engine in new window.

:buffer command

Select tabs by URL or title matched by keywords.

:set command

:set command can set properties on console.

smoothscroll property

Enable/disable smooth scroll.

:set smoothscroll   " enable smooth scroll
:set nosmoothscroll " disable smooth scroll

hintchars property

Set hint characters

:set hintchars=0123456789

Search engines

Vim Vixen supports search by search engines like Google and Yahoo.

You can configure search engines, including the default search engine, in the add-ons preferences. The URLs specified in "engines" must contain a {}-placeholder, which will be replaced with the search keyword parameters of the command.

{
  "search": {
    "default": "google",
    "engines": {
      "google": "https://google.com/search?q={}",
      "yahoo": "https://search.yahoo.com/search?p={}",
      "bing": "https://www.bing.com/search?q={}",
      "duckduckgo": "https://duckduckgo.com/?q={}",
      "twitter": "https://twitter.com/search?q={}",
      "wikipedia": "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search={}"
    }
  }
}

Blacklist

The blacklist allows you to disable the plugin for certain pages by URL patterns. For instance, when you describe "*.slack.com", the plugin is disabled on any Slack rooms. In addition, you can also specify path patterns, such as "example.com/mail/*".

{
  "blacklist": [
    "*.slack.com",
    "example.com/mail/*"
  ]
}

You can toggle Vim Vixen between disabled and enabled with shift + Esc.

Licence

MIT