Chrome Extension: Vimium: Efficient Mouse-less Browsing

[VLSmooth]

If you don't use Chrome, feel free to stop reading.

I consider myself an emacs user, but Vimium is just too awesome. In a nutshell, it pretty much allows efficient mouse-less web browsing. The real key is "link hints mode".


This identifies all visible links and forms in a page and assigns a short unique alphabetical string to them (can choose letters under advanced options, default is weighted toward a qwerty keyboard's home row). Typing the string is equivalent to clicking on the associated link. O(1) link access vs O(n) (via tabbing) is a definite win in my book.

I've discovered a few quirks:

• Some javascript links are not being identified
  (example: when uploading the above image to imageshack)
• Conflicts with pages that already have keyboard shortcuts (ie. Google Reader)
  This is alleviated by adding wildcards to Vimium's excluded url filter
  (for example: "http*://www.google.com/reader/*")
• Conflicts with basic keyboard shortcuts
  (example: <c-f> is "find" in Chrome and "scrollFullPageDown" in Vimium. I simply unmap'd <c-f> under the advanced options)

However, for the most part, this extension is very promising. At the very least, I haven't uninstalled it yet.

Pro-tip: "?" displays Vimium help when not in insert mode.

[quantus]

Sounds a lot like what screen readers do for the blind except screen readers make you enter a shortcut to get the list of links first. Screen readers have additional hot keys to extract other lists from the page like headings. Screen readers also have "insertion" mode to avoid entering text when not intended into fields.