Custom Key Maps For Vimium To Speed Up Browsing

Chillar Anand

4 min read

2014-04-26

For keyboard ninjas, Vimium is a boon! Vimium made browsing with keyboard a cat walk and ditch the mouse completely! This post is specifically written for those who are good at Vim and installed Vimium on Chrome or Firefox!

Vimium is THE BEST Chrome extension for Keyboard navigation! Since it was inspired by Vim, most of the shortcuts resemble that of vim. In Vim, we can set custom maps, if we are not comfortable with a particular command. The same goes for Vimium also!

By having some custom mapping, we can make surfing the web much easier and productive! Lets look at some custom maps which will come handy in everyday browsing.

0. Characters Used for Link Hints!

By default some characters are set for link hints. But I am more comfortable with the following keys

"sdfercvjkluim". So I set the characters to "fjdkslrueiwvm". But You can choose the key which you are comfortable with and use them. So when you press "f" or "F", characters used to suggest links will be the ones which you are comfortable to type!

1. Navigating Your History!

I navigate back and forth a lot. To back in history, I need to press "H" ( which means SHIFT + h ). So I mapped this 'h'. Actually by default h is mapped to scroll left, which I never use at all. So, to go back 3 pages in history, U just press "3h". The same applies for "L" also.

2. Navigating to New pages

By default "o" is mapped to open URL ( or bookmarks or history ) in current tab and "O" to open them in new tab. Most of the time, I need to open URL in new tabs only so I swapped the above options. The same goes for "b" ( for bookmarks ) also.

You can get a list of all shortcuts at Vimium Github page or if You have installed Vimium, You can just press "?" You can set these custom maps in advanced settings of Vimium

Custom Key Mappings


                        

                            map h goBack

                            map l goForward

                            map o Vomnibar.activateInNewTab

                            map O Vomnibar.activate

                            map b Vomnibar.activateBookmarksInNewTab

                            map B Vomnibar.activateBookmarks

Characters used for Link hints:

fjdkslrueiwvm

With these custom key maps, browsing becomes much productive.

Need further help with this? Feel free to send a message.