Configure Basic Aspects of Vimium

[00:00] Let's talk a little bit about configuration with Vimium. So when we have the plugin or the extension installed and enabled, it's going to appear up here on Chrome. So we can click on that and we see this pop open. We're going to ignore this for a second and we're going to go to options. This opens up a tab that allows us to configure options for Vimium.

[00:23] There's only a couple things in here that I want to focus on. The first and probably most useful is excluding certain URLs from being used by Vimium. These are URLs where we don't want the Vimium key bindings to override whatever other functionality that page does. So Gmail is a good example of this. There are all kinds of custom key bindings that Gmail enables, and I don't want to clobber those with the Vimium key binding.

[00:50] So I just say, if I'm on a Gmail site, let's not enable Vimium. Let's see another example of this. So Wordle, I want to be able to type in these letters here. So I can type in an A and that appears, but as soon as I type something like GE, well that triggers the GE Vimium keybinding instead of adding the letters G and E to Wordle. So instead, what I want to do is I can go back to the options, and I can add a rule, and I could enter in the URL there.

[01:26] An easier way of doing it, though, is to go back to the WordAll page, click on the Vimium extension, and click Exclude Vimium Keys on this page. And this is the rule it wants to add. Maybe I don't want to do it for all of New York Times, but I would like to do it for GamesWordle. And then I want to exclude all keys and then save changes. So that should be saved, can X out of that.

[01:57] If I come over here and refresh, I see that pop up. Now, if I type in GE, it's going to put in those characters. Now, just to show off one neat feature of Bimium, if I get rid of that rule, save changes, GE is going to pop it open again, but I can put myself in insert mode by hitting I. We see that this tells me down here that I'm in insert mode. Once I'm in insert mode, all keys that I send to the browser are going to be ignored by Vimium except for the escape key, which means they'll get passed through to the page itself.

[02:34] So now I can type GE and it gets passed in. And then when I'm done and want to be back in normal Vimeo mode, I can hit escape and I leave it in insert mode. But I digress. So excluding URLs, that's useful for various web pages. Custom mappings we'll go into in a different lesson, same with custom search engines.

[02:56] Otherwise there's some advanced options. I tend to leave all of these as they are. For instance, you can modify what characters pop up when you hit the F key. I think what they have there is good enough. So these are mostly the ones on the home row, and then a few others that are right within reach of the more dominant fingers.

[03:16] So I like to leave these as is. I guess if you were working with a different keyboard layout, like Dvorak or something like that, you might have some opinions about what these characters should be. Another one to point out, I tend to use Google, but if you prefer to use DuckDuckGo, you can set that as your default search engine. That way when you're on a page like this and you search for something like corn shell, and then you go into visual mode and hit shift P, This will pop open in Google with a search for corn shell, but if you were to set this to something like DuckDuckGo, then it would run that search against DuckDuckGo instead. These Previous and next patterns, if you happen to use pages where you want to be able to navigate forwards and backwards through sequences of pages, these are the keywords that they look out for for those links.

[04:14] You can modify CSS, things like that. I'll leave the rest for you to explore just by coming to this options page, but I've highlighted the things that I find useful.