Developer Productivity tip no. 42: Mouse-less Browsing with Vimium

All about making things more efficient

published: 26 September 2013

I’m all about making things more efficient, and I’m increasingly finding the love for Vim. It helps me stay in the flow and get closer to my code. It’s also fantastic that so many tools have a Vim-like plug-in so that my hard won lessons with Vim productivity can be re-used in so many places!

Stop wasting time trying to point at stuff

One area that I really wanted to get rid of the mouse is browsing the web. Most people look at me a bit funny when I say this, but trust me, just try it, it makes browsing so much quicker and easier. Enter Vimium.

Vimium

You don’t use Chrome?

Vimium is a Chrome extension. I use chrome solely now, having moved from Firefox a couple of years ago. If you use Firefox, then I hear Vimperator works well, but haven’t tried it myself. I recommend you just move over to Chrome anyway ;)

So what can Vimium do?

Hmm… Well, I figure a quick video would describe it better. But I’m lazy, so I figured someone else has probably already done this better than I would anyway. Indeed Ilya Sukhar has done just that, so just watch this instead:

Watched it? No?! Oh well okay, the short story is this:

Top tips:

Enjoy, and keep sharpening that saw!