Since switching to Vim and working on accessibility related projects, I’ve become very comfortable using just the keyboard. Not only comfortable, but efficient as well. In order to get the Vim feel along with the requirements of surfing the web (you know, follow hyperlinks and such), I’ve been running using a few plugins that make me feel at home in my browser.
For Chrome, I’ve installed:
It works really well, except for one caveat. The hot key for Keyboard Navigation is the “,” key. Generally this isn’t an issue as it’s smart enough to know when you’re in a form field. However, using applications that mimic form fields for input, like GMail, this fails and whenever I hit “,”, it triggers the plugin. Vimium is robust enough to provide pattern matching to turn off the plugin on certain pages. Keyboard Navigation does not, a it desperately needs it. I’ve been able to hack around this using Typinator and binding “,c” to output “,” and it does the trick.
Either way, I’m still very happy with this workflow for running through articles or reading NewBlur.com, my RSS reader of choice.