Vimperator for Firefox Part 2

Welcome back to my tutorial on Vimperator. In this section I will give an introduction to the command line and some pointers on configuration. If you enjoy this post or believe reading was a waste of time please tell me why below.

Remember this tutorial assumes familiarity with vi and also that you have read parts 1 and 1.5.

Opening the command line

Like in vi the standard way of entering the command line is by pressing : but as you may have of guessed if you have followed my previous tutorials shortcuts such as o and b also take you into it with a command entered for you. If you want to cancel a command simply press ESC to return to browsing mode.

Unlike the text editor that inspired it the automatic completion in Vimperator displays a list of what you are likely to type next as well as descriptions of what those things do.

Back and forward

While the shortcut of numberCTRL+o is highly convenient for going back multiple pages you do not always know how far you want to go. In these situations you can use the :back and :forward commands to see a numbered list of URLs and their page titles.

Opening dialogues

To access a dialogue without resorting to hunting around with a mouse type in :dia dialogue.

The names of some dialogues you are likely to open are:

• addbookmark
• bookmarks
• history
• print
• customizetoolbar

NOTE: Do not use the preferences and searchengines dialogues! These will leave your browser window inoperable! Use  :o about:preferences instead.

Adding bookmarks

To add a bookmark type :bmark Address

For more specific bookmarks the following flags can be used:

• -f Folder it will be saved in
• -t Title for the bookmark
• -T Tags
• -k keyword

Example:

This command can also be accessed with the current URL automatically filled out by using the a shortcut.

Setting options

Temporarily changing a setting is simple; set varname=value

Some useful variables to change are:

• apptab When set to true the current tab becomes a pinned ‘app’.
• gui Used to change what elements of the browser window are displayed.
• tabnumbers When set to true each tab has a number displayed on it. I strongly recommend setting this to true
• defsearch Used to change what search engine is used by default
• complete Changes what sources are used to provide search suggestions (search engines, history, bookmarks, etc.)
• suggestengines Search engines to draw search suggestions from
• hintchars Characters used for labelling links/form elements when f is pressed
• history How many commands to log for future use

Saving settings

:mkvimperatorrc Creates a new configuration in your home directory if you do not already have one. To overwrite an already existing configuration use :mkvimperatorrc! instead. This file will be called .vimperatorrc on Linux (and presumably *BSD/Mac OS) or _vimperatorrc on Windows.

NOTE: For some reason :mkvimperatorrc refuses to save the value of gui. If you want to change this variable you will have to edit the configuration file by hand.

My own settings file