Thameera's MicroBlog

If you are a die-hard Vim fan and haven’t heard of Vimperator already, here’s great news: You can control your web browser using the keyboard without the need to touch your mouse just like in Vim.

Vimperator is a Firefox extension that creates a Vim-like environment in your browser. It removes all clutter including the menu bar, tool bar and bookmarks bar. However if you want, you can bring them up again using a simple command. Navigating the pages are same as in Vim, use hjkl and what-not. The list of commands you can use is enormous, but thankfully Vimperator has a great documentation as well. Just type :help and hit Enter to view the help.

You can build aliases, map keystrokes, etc in a separate configuration file named .vimperatorrc. There are also dozens of plugins available.

It takes some time to get used to the command-only interface, but once you are through you will know that it’s worth the effort.

Take a look at the minimal look of Firefox once Vimperator is installed:

There’s news that Chrome is going to get its own PDF viewer. Yes, opening PDFs in Chrome has always been a real pain in the ass. But there’s always been better alternatives to opening the PDFs in your browser.

In the google search page, simply click on the Quick View button and the PDFs are rendered in an HTML-like format. This won’t load the actual PDFs, but for most of our day-to-day needs and previewing the PDFs, Quick View serves just fine.