The Hacker’s Browser Plugin

A plugin that increases speed and efficiency while browsing the internet? Yes please! I only recently found out about Vimium and wanted to share my thoughts on this plugin.

We all spend too much time on the internet. Reading forums, blogs, facebook, twitter, news, youtube,…the list goes on and on. Phil Crosby and Ilya Sukhar created Vimium to speed up the navigation of websites. No longer must you use your mouse to click that link, or trackpad to scroll down. Check out the keyboard shortcuts in the picture above. The shortcuts mimic the vim text based editor, so if you have any prior knowledge of vim remembering the shortcuts is quite easy.

Vimium - Project Website

Demo Video

Thoughts

Vimium is amazing! Even if you only use 3-4 of the features selecting links and scrolling become much faster. I would recomend anyone who uses Chrome to at least give the plugin a try. Once it is installed if you ever forget the shortcuts just type a ?.

Other browsers

When I original wrote this article my main browser at the time was Google Chrome. Since then I have had to use Safari due to some compatibility issues. Guy Thompson created a port of vimium for Safari that works quite well. Check it out.