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

[Bob Proulx]

Chad Perrin wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > Chad Perrin wrote:
> > > What would you use for Back and Forward in browser history instead
> > > of H and L?
> > 
> > I switched them with J and K since to me the forward and backward in
> > history is mentally more of a stack-like queue.  Up (goBack) and Down
> > (goForward) fit me better.  YMMV.
> 
> I tend to think of it as left to right -- because that's how the tabs are
> visibly arranged, I guess.

Tabs are not history forward and back though.  Tabs are left and right
across the top of the browser.  So using left (H) and right (L) for
tab-left and tab-right make sense to me.  But history forward and back
and can't be seen on the screen.  So those keys are arbitrary.  They
could be anything since there isn't positional information on the
screen display for them.

> Sorry -- I don't know, because I'm not an Emacs person, so I basically
> had no reason to look.

As you can see from my use of Vimium that the plugin doesn't need to
be an emacs plugin nor a vim plugin.  The key for page link navigation
provided by f and F in Vimium is editor agnostic.

> Sorry, I don't know of a quick fix for your highlight-and-delete problem.

I do.  This solves it well enough.  Now that it is working again.

cat > ~/.gtkrc-2.0 <<EOF
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
EOF

And then the key style is back to the traditional MIT X model.

> Are you sure that Ctrl Z (undo) won't work for that on MS Windows?

You are right.  It does work.  I learned something useful today.  I
wonder if it didn't work in the past when I first ran into it.  (That
is my story and I am sticking with it.)

> I'm pretty sure that CUA was specified (and named) by IBM, though
> Microsoft may well have had input into the process, and uses the heck out
> of it.

Wikipedia seems to agree that it was developed by IBM.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

But it lists

  The Cut command is Shift+Del; Copy is Ctrl+Ins; Paste is Shift+Ins;

> > Code bloat and creeping features is the biggest threat that I see.
> > For example right now there is a discussion in two different
> > Debian mailing lists about a base Squeeze installation not fitting
> > into a 512M partition.
>
> Holy cow.  It *has* grown since I stopped using it regularly.

It is the problem of "The Camel in the Tent" or "If you give a mouse a
cookie..."  People are always wanting just one more option to 'ls'.
Or wanting just one more feature to 'cp', as if 'rsync' doesn't have
enough to go around for everyone plus a few.  Multibyte character
support and locales are good but costly.  Everything has just
incrementally grown slowly over time.

Of course Firefox isn't in the bare base installation but it provides
too good of an example to pass up.  Look at Firefox 3.0 which
introduced a full SQL relational database into their location bar.
Wow.  Of course there are others that love that feature.  Fortunately
they did choose a good implementation.  But still...

Bob