Vimium's Vomnibar is a "command palette"-like search tool for your open tabs, browser history, and bookmarks. We can search through and jump to any tab open across browser windows. We can also do a generalized search with results that also include browser history and bookmarks which can either be opened in the current tab or a new tab. If you're anything like me, you open tons of tabs and visit hundreds of webpages over the course of a week. The vomnibar puts all of that at your fingertips.
Lesson 8 of 9
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Transcript
[00:00] One of the more powerful features of Vimyum is a feature called the VomniBar. To give you an idea of how it works, let's first look at a Chrome feature. If I hit Command-Shift-A, it pops open some tabs, and if I start typing, it's going to narrow it down to any tabs that match the text that I've typed in as a keyword. And if I hit Enter, it's going to jump to that tab. So let's hit G0, jump back here.
[00:26] Now the Omnibar works sort of like that, but has some additional functionality. So if I hit O, it pops open this input area, and if I start to type in svelte, it's going to give me that option as well as some options from my search history, from my Chrome history rather. I can escape out of that. Let's instead look for lobsters, and I can jump to that tab. Or if I hit Shift-T, it'll just search through tabs, and I can look for postgres, and I see this option here is going to jump me to that tab, so on and so forth.
[01:05] Now if I do Shift-O, whatever I select is going to open into a new tab. So I'm going to type in bigint, And I see a history item as well as some bookmarks that I've made in Chrome. So if I go and hit Enter on this item, it's going to open that in a new tab. I'm going to hit G0 again, because I want to now talk about how search engines factor into what the VomniBar is able to do. So if I hit O-W space, it now just says Wikipedia.
[01:36] This is because I have a custom search engine built into VomniBar for Wikipedia. And if I start typing something like Unix, I'm going to see these different options pop up. And if I select one, it's going to jump me to the Unix Wikipedia page. I'm going to hit Shift-H to go back. Now let's do Shift-K to go over here and look at a custom search engine that we might want to do.
[01:59] Here's the Wikipedia one that's already baked in. Now what if I'm to want to add MDN for instance? Well, let's see what search on MDN looks like. So I'm going to hit Shift-K twice to get over to this MDN site, and I can see that I've already done a search on MDN for the keywords text area. I'm going to go ahead and yy to grab that under my paste buffer, and then I'm going to hit shift J twice to get back over here, gi to focus this text area, and paste it in.
[02:30] Although text area isn't what I always want to search for. I want to search for whatever has been typed in the Omnibar. So I'm going to remove that and instead put percent S, which is what they're instructing us to do here. Then I'm going to escape FW to save those changes. Now, if I pop open the bar and I hit MDN, space, I'm searching MDN now, and I can look for on change.
[02:57] This pops open a search on MDN and I can start to look through what's available for a change event. Though I'm not a heavy bookmark user, I will point out that you can hit B to search through your bookmarks, or you can hit Shift-B to again search through your bookmarks, which will be the variant of opening it in the current tab versus opening it in a new tab.