A powerful navigation and interaction feature, and probably my most used Vimium feature, is Link Hints. By hitting f, we prompt Vimium to overlay link hints for every visible link, button, and interactive HTML element (e.g. a text area). By typing the keys corresponding to a link hint, we effectively click that link or element. We also look at a few page movement commands like scrolling up (k) and down (j) as well as jumping to the top of a page (gg) and to the bottom (G). Putting all of these together, we can get into a fluid and efficient flow for common browser tasks.
Lesson 1 of 9
Get Started with Vimium
Transcript
[00:00] It's really specific to each person's workflow, how they might employ Vimium. So I'm just going to demonstrate one of the key features that I find useful. So open a link. So this F command here, I find really useful for moving around a page, clicking on links, all from my keyboard. So if I jump over to this GitHub repository here, I can just start off by hitting F, and I'm going to see a bunch of little yellow tags appear.
[00:30] All these tags are appearing where there are links or items like a text box that can be interacted with on the page. So I wanna go to pull requests, so I just hit the key combination that is by the link I wanna go to. So that's gonna be JE up there in that sort of top navigation. So I'm gonna hit J-E and it navigates to pull request. Now I'm gonna see several pull requests that I want to look at, evaluate, and potentially merge.
[00:57] So I'm gonna start with this thruster one. So I'm gonna hit F again, F-M. That's gonna jump me to the pull request. Now, there's not a lot of detail in the pull request as it renders, but I can see if there's a changelog and commits items that I can disclose. I'm going to go ahead and hit F again, DG, see the change log, build with go.
[01:21] That doesn't seem super consequential to my repository. I think it's going to be fine. So I'm going to go ahead, hitting J to navigate down. I can hit K to go back up. These are all the kinds of key bindings that allow you to move around.
[01:36] I'm gonna see the rebase and merge. So I hit F and hit FF to hit that rebase and merge. I can hit escape if I decide I don't want to hit a particular link quite yet. I could also interact with this dropdown. So I'm gonna hit SF instead.
[01:53] And now I see that I have two different options. If I hit F again, I can switch which of those options I wanna use, hit AW, and now it's squash and merge. I don't want to use squash and merge though, so I'm going to go back and do SW, rebase and merge. F, I'm going to hit AD, and now it's going to prompt me to confirm. So I'm going to hit F again and then hit SC to confirm.
[02:20] And I can even go as far as to delete the branch, so F and then AE. Great, that branch is deleted. I hit GG to go back to the top. Hit F and I can now see JF will take me back to the pull request. So you kind of see you can get into a little bit of a flow here where you just hit F move to a thing, scroll around, hit F move to a thing.
[02:41] So I'm going to go to the next one then. I can hit AP. That's going to jump to this next one. Standard is just a dev tool. Let's see what's in the changelog.
[02:53] Again, nothing too consequential. I feel good about merging that as is. I'll go ahead and flfsf. I hit it too quick. The page shifted on me, but that's fine.
[03:07] I hit escape and then can hit, oops, jumped on me again. I must have triggered it the first time. So now I'm going to go back to pull request page, and I see one more that I want to look at, jl. And the dependent bot re-rendered the page on me because there's some rebasing happening that's going to affect the PR. So that's fine.
[03:42] Let's look at the release notes once more. You can see some different things going on here. And you know, I want to take a closer look at these before I merge them into a repository. So I'm going to call it good there, but I guess just to illustrate the point, I can interact with this text area. So SP, I can say, let's test this out in dev before merging it in.
[04:09] I hit escape, F, S, W, and that applies my comment. Oops, I'm still focused. Now I can see my comment appeared there. And yeah, that's one of the ways that I use Vimium to quickly move around my browser, do different things, interact, navigate to links, and generally just get into a nice rhythm with the work that I'm doing.