The Vimium Chrome extension enhances page navigation and searching. By pressing forward slash, users enter find mode to search terms on the page. Additional keys like 'N' and Shift+N help navigate through search results forwards and backwards, respectively. The extension proves especially useful on complex web pages, like Stack Overflow, for quickly locating specific sections like answers or share links without reading through all the content.
Lesson 2 of 9
Get Started with Vimium
Transcript
[00:00] The Vimium Chrome extension has a nice way of moving around a page and finding specific things on a page that you're looking for via a search or find type feature. Now most browsers are going to have something like Command-F where you can search for something, but I sort of like the Vimium way of doing it. So if I hit forward slash, we can see that this box pops up here and I can start to search for something like find. And it jumps me down to this using find section on the Vimium GitHub page where I can see basically the feature that I'm describing. Forward slash to enter find mode, N to cycle forward through the matches, capital N to cycle backward to previous matches.
[00:46] So I can hit enter to finalize that search and I can hit N to go to the next and the next. I can hit shift N to go back through. So let's look at where this might be useful in a sort of real world setting. So I've ended up on this stack overflow page. Now there's a long question.
[01:08] I think it's related to what I'm trying to figure out. I don't want to read through the whole thing, but what I do want to do is jump to the answers. So I'm going to go ahead and hit forward slash and start typing answers, and it zips me down to the beginning of the answers where I can see the 38 answers. So that's a lot of answers, and I can escape out of that. And now I can see, you know, start to read through this first answer.
[01:33] Now I like what I see in this answer, so perhaps I want to share it with someone, so I can go ahead and search for share. I often have trouble finding this link on the Stack Overflow pages. It just sort of blends into the rest of the text, so it's nice to be able to search for it. Now that I've found it, I hit enter and it focuses it. It gives the browser focus to that element which is nice because then I can hit enter and that pops that open and I could hit escape and F which we learned about in another lesson, and DH will copy that link then.
[02:06] I've still got share as my search keyword, so if I hit N, it's going to jump me to the next one, which is sort of a way of getting around jumping to the next answer. So I see the next answer, I can hit N again and it'll jump me down to the third answer and so forth. You can also hit Shift N to go back up to those different answers. If I hit question mark, I can see the details of everything that Vimvim offers, and again we'll see find mode described here. It's a great way for navigating around a page.