[NCLUG] [OT?] Vimium on Chromium on FreeBSD

[Bob Proulx]

Chad Perrin wrote:
> Those of you who like vi/Vim, the Chromium browser, and FreeBSD might be

I am an Emacs person but the fingers still know the vi keys and they
are convenient on occasion.  :-)

> 5. Sadly, Vimium still is not working perfectly here.  It installs, but has
> some annoying quirks.

I use Vimium with Chromium.  It was the extension that made Chromium
usable to me since it provides keys for page navigation.  That plus
setting gtk-key-theme-name to "Emacs" makes it bearable.  In Firefox I
use the Firemacs plugin and can't live without it.  I have been
looking for a Firemax equivalent for Chromium but so far none exist
that I know about.  But Vimium is great for improving Chromium in
similar ways and helps this Emacs user out quite a bit.

But Chromium has annoying quirks...

For example, Vimium allows you to specify keys for navigation.  That
is awesome.  But those customizations only work on normal external web
pages.  They do not work on Chromium's internal pages such as the
about:plugins (any about:* page) or "New Tab" pages or gallery pages
or others.  This affects all plugins such as Vimium and "Navigate on
paste".  This means that it is impossible to have a consistently
customized user interface across the entire GUI.  I find myself doing
strange things such as C-t (open new tab), then TAB-Enter to select a
normal page to get back to where customizations work again and then
pasting in URLs (so the Navigate on paste plugin works).  And there I
am navigating away using keys and then suddenly they go dead when I
find myself on an internal page.  Bah!

Vimium is a great extension for Chromium.  But like all extensions it
is limited by what Chromium allows it to do.  Chromium is really
annoying when crossing over those rough edges.

Bob