Vim your browser with Vimium

Once the grammar from part 1 is in your fingers, the mouse starts to feel slow everywhere, and nowhere more than in the browser. Vimium fixes that. It's a Chrome extension (Firefox users: Vimium-FF works, Tridactyl goes deeper) that puts Vim keys on every webpage.

The pitch is one keystroke: press f.

The f key

Press f on any page and every clickable thing sprouts a one- or two-letter label. Type the label, the link gets clicked. That's it. No mouse, no tabbing through elements, no guessing.

F does the same but opens the link in a new tab. Between these two keys and scroll, you can browse for an hour without touching the mouse. This is the Vimium habit that sticks first, usually within a day.

The keys worth learning, in order

Scrolling feels like Vim because it is Vim:

• j / k scroll down and up, d / u half pages
• gg top of page, G bottom
• H / L go back and forward in history
• r reload

Tabs:

• J / K switch to the tab on the left / right
• t new tab, x close tab, X bring back the tab you just closed
• T search your open tabs by title. With forty tabs open, this one is worth the whole extension.

The omnibar:

• o open a URL, bookmark, or history entry (type to fuzzy-search)
• O same, in a new tab
• b / B bookmarks only

And the sleepers:

• gi focus the first input field on the page. Search boxes, login forms, comment fields.
• yy copy the current URL. yf copy a link's URL by hint, without opening it.
• gu go up one level in the URL path, gU to the site root. Great for climbing out of deep docs pages.
• / find in page, n / N next and previous, exactly like Vim.
• ? shows every binding when you forget one. You will.

When Vimium gets in the way

Two escape hatches, and knowing them is the difference between loving and uninstalling it.

Press i for insert mode: Vimium steps aside and the page gets your keys until you press Esc. Use it on anything that has its own shortcuts.

For sites where you always want that (Gmail, Notion, Google Docs, your cloud consoles), don't toggle every time. Open Vimium's options and add them to the exclusion list with a URL pattern like https://mail.google.com/*. Vimium disables itself there, permanently, and stops fighting the app.

Text fields are handled automatically: click or gi into an input and your typing goes to the input, not to Vimium.

The honest limits

Some pages beat it. Heavy canvas apps (Figma, Google Sheets) don't expose clickable elements the way Vimium wants. Embedded PDFs ignore it entirely, because Chrome's PDF viewer is its own world. And browser-reserved shortcuts like Ctrl-w can't be remapped by any extension, so a stray "close tab" reflex still costs you a tab now and then.

None of that changes the daily math. Ninety percent of browsing is: open page, scroll, follow link, switch tab, search. Vimium covers all of it with the keys your hands already know.

Start here

Install Vimium, then do just three things for the first week: f to click, j/k to scroll, T to find tabs. Add the rest when you notice yourself reaching for the mouse and getting annoyed. The annoyance is the curriculum.

Next and last: the shell, tmux, k9s, and every other place Vim has been hiding.