Vimium's "marks" feature lets you mark positions in the current tab and across tabs. These are positional markers that you can jump back to. For instance, as you browse a huge page of documentation or a massive forum discussion, you can leave a series of "dog ears" to sections or conversations that you'll later want to revisit. Each tab supports its own set of lower-case letter marks. Upper-case letter marks are shared across tabs allowing you to seamlessly move between a specific set of tabs regardless of how they are arranged.
Lesson 5 of 9
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Transcript
[00:00] Marks are one of those odd features of Vimium that is sort of hard to imagine using until you see it in practice. The idea behind a mark is that you can set a mark for yourself anywhere on a page and that's a point in the page that you can jump back to. You can think of it as the ability to bookmark several spots in a page such as a big documentation page. I'm going to look for bat... No, expansion.
[00:31] And shell expansions jumps up. I'm going to hit F to trigger the link following feature, and then H to go to shell expansions. And now I'm just going to start browsing. This is me just on a documentation page trying to learn a bit more about some Bash features. As I'm going, I say, read this, and I think this is an interesting example.
[00:56] I want to check this out, but I'm going to mark it for now so that I can keep reading. I'm going to use the A mark to start, so I'm going to hit MA, and we can see in the bottom right corner, it said created a local mark. Now I'm gonna keep scrolling, and I'm scrolling quickly, but imagine I'm taking my time in reading, and I'm now into this portion of the shell expansion docs where seeing these different examples and I see parameter colon offset. Okay, I need to learn more about this. So now I'm going to set another mark and just to go in alphabetical order, this one's going to be lowercase b so I'm going to hit mb and I'll look again in the bottom right corner say create a local mark b and now I'll keep going and let's say I eventually get somewhere else in the page and I think this is a great example too.
[01:49] So I'm going to go ahead and say MC, and I've created a couple marks. So now how do I jump to those marks? Like let's say I've finished reading the docs, I'm all the way down at the bottom of the page. Now I want to go back and look through the different places that I bookmarked to remind myself, oh yeah, this was interesting, I want to read more about this. So now I hit tilde, or sorry, not tilde, but the backtick, which is the same key as tilde.
[02:14] I hit backtick A, and that's just going to jump me to this point in the document. Remember we looked at this here? Now if I hit backtick B, it jumps me to this parameter colon offset, and then if I hit backtick C, it jumps me to this third portion that I had marked. I can hit double backtick and it'll go to the previous jump point. So it goes right back to my B mark.
[02:38] And if I hit it again, it'll just go back to my C mark. I've been using lowercase letters this whole time to set what are called local marks, but I could instead use capital letters to set global marks. So if I instead hit M, Shift, A, I've created a global mark. And now let's say I'm over here on this page. I've got a couple different tabs open that I'm browsing around, reading documentation in various places, and now I want to cycle back through my global marks.
[03:08] I can do that by hitting backtick shift A, and it's going to move me to the tab and location of that global bookmark that I've set. So again, marks are kind of an odd feature that Vimium provides, but if you keep an eye out for when they might be useful, especially when browsing along forum or a big page of documentation, You might find that they're a nice way to be able to mark your spot and be able to jump around the document without too much fuss.