With these advanced URL manipulation commands we have a whole new way to think about traversing between locations on a website. This is especially useful for sites like GitHub that use a hierarchical URL structure. Since each layer of the URL is a valid page, we can move up that structure (with gu) and edit the current URL (with ge) to navigate somewhere else.
Lesson 4 of 9
Get Started with Vimium
Transcript
[00:00] Let's look at a couple of the advanced URL manipulation features of Vimium. Now these are features that are not documented in the help that's included with Vimium, but they are documented in the README if I jump over here. So you'll find some additional advanced browsing commands. So I find with Vimium that it's helpful to read both the included help and the readme docs that are in the repository. So I'm going to hit shift j to jump back over here and I'm going to hit Escape to leave the help.
[00:34] Now I'm on the page for a specific pull request in the Vimium repository. The first thing I want to look at is GU, which stands for Go Up, or that's at least how you can think about it. If I hit G capital U, that's going to go all the way up. So I hit G capital U, and we'll see it just takes me to github.com, and I'll hit shift H to go back to where I was. Essentially what gu is going to do if I hit the lowercase version is it's going to move me up one portion of the URL at a time.
[01:10] So let's take a look at that one step at a time. I'm going to hit g lowercase u, And it goes up to my polls. If I hit GU again, it's going to go up to the Vimium repository. If I go up again, I'm going to go to this person's GitHub profile page, and then I can hit Shift-H to start going back in history to where I was. There's a lot of websites that are structured similar to GitHub where you end up in this nested URL structure and so this can be a nice way to say look at a pull request, then go up, then hit F and go to the next pull request, so on and so forth.
[01:48] So that's G capital U and GU. Go all the way up and go up one. The next advanced feature that I want to look at is GE, which is sort of the ease like edit. So you can edit the URL if you would like so I'm gonna hit GE and that's gonna pop open this Input area that's sort of overlaid on the web page where I can then say edit this to be 4620 And then I can hit enter and go and that takes me to a different page. Or I can hit GE and just get rid of that and just go to issues.
[02:26] I'm going to hit shift H to go back. And now the other thing you can do is you can hit G capital E. It's going to bring up the same prompt, but now whatever URL that I submit, it's going to open it in a new tab.