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What's wrong with existing browser extensions like Vimperator or Vimium?

• tradesmanhelix 9y ago
  Mozilla's planned deprecation of XUL-based add-ons sadly makes the future of vim-like extensions doubtful at best on Firefox: https://www.change.org/p/mozilla-save-mozilla-firefox-s-best-feature https://www.change.org/p/mozilla-save-mozilla-firefox-s-best.... Additionally, qutebrowser has a number of features that Vimium on Chrome doesn't have and probably can't implement due to the limitations of the WebExtension API.
• The-Compiler 9y ago
  I've used Vimium for some months myself, and wasn't really happy with it. The reasons why mainly boil down to how VimFx/Vimium are quite limited in what they can do. For example: - They can't change the user interface at all - qutebrowser has a much more minimal UI. - They can't spawn external processes. In qutebrowser, you can simply hit ctrl-e while editing some text input, to edit it in Vim. Or you can use `:bind ,v spawn mpv {url}` to add a keybinding which spawns mpv with the current page, to watch YouTube videos in a real video player. - As soon as you are on some special page (like the Chrome extension store, or the "new tab" page), they stop working, because they can't intercept keypresses there. - In general, qutebrowser is much more configurable and extensible. You can easily integrate it with shell scripts via userscripts (https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/userscripts.asciidoc https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/u...), and soon there'll be a Python plugin API as well. As for Vimperator - as mentioned, that probably won't be around in its current form much longer.