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Just tried vimium, vimium-c, and tridactyl. Unfortunately none of them currently work correctly on Orion.

Install any of them, press f to highlight links, and observe that Orion cannot navigate to a highlighted link when the keys are pressed.

I realize these are probably about the most complex extensions possible so it makes sense that they might not work while Orion's extension support grows.

Vlad You should be able to pinpoint the issues by installing any of these extensions then attempting to follow their tutorials or use basic commands from their ? menu. I hope we can eventually get to a point where at least one of the vim extensions functions well. At least for me this is the last big thing missing from Orion.

Just a guess but I think the type technical of people who want a vim mode extension are also probably some of the best potential contributors, so getting a vim extension working might attract more developers to Orion and increase contributions.

  • Vlad replied to this.

      evelant

      You should be able to pinpoint the issues by installing any of these extensions then attempting to follow their tutorials or use basic commands from their ? menu

      Respectfully, we do not have time to do this. There are over 300,000 extensions out there, imagine us debugging each like that with a team of three people, while building a web browser.

      What we need from the community is top three features of the extensions that you want fixed, with steps to reproduce each of them.

          I totally understand & this style of plugin is probably a bit of a monster of quirks, this might not be the top three but the ones I think are the main problems:

          Using Vimium (1.67) from Chrome Store:

          1) This is the top priority issue: On any page you can press 'f' and a load of link hints will appear (loads of yellow boxes with 1 or 2 letters). You type the hint letters (they are shown in caps but it doesn't matter) and it'll navigate to that link. Mostly this works however: You now type 'H' to go back to the previous page. You type 'f' again. You just get the vimium ui showning a 'Collecting Hints...' box in the bottom right of the window but no hints appear. You generally have to refresh the page to get the hints to work again (but sometimes I have to reopen a new tab to get it working again). Minor related issue; typing 'F' (i.e. cap f instead) should open the chosen link in a new tab but it doesn't.

          2) Type '/' should allow searching the page. It opens a search box in the bottom right corner - it should immediately take the cursor focus and allow you to start typing what you are searching for in the current page, press Enter and you should be able to press 'n' or 'N' to show cycle through the matches. Pressing Escape whilst typing in the search box will close the search box and take you out of 'search mode'. This kind of works but quite often the search box doesn't get focus, pressing Escape whilst typing in the search box doesn't close the search box and (albeit minor) the matched text selection boxes look odd.

          3) I'm not sure what's the best to choose for 3 - it's either 'o' which opens up a search bar similar to 2 but it allows you to search your history and open the link - again it doesn't get focus and stops working when you go back. Or that 'x' and 'X' should close the current tab, and reopen the last closed respectively.

            evelant ha with 1Password done this is the only thing stopping me from switching so Iā€™m really interested in seeing it working - hope my 3 were similar to yours šŸ˜†

            • Vlad replied to this.

                kulehandluke "this is the only thing stopping me from switching "

                You have no idea how many times I heard this. I only wish you guys didnt all have a different 'only thing stopping me from switching" as that would make our job easy, and not having 2000 open issues!

                    Vlad Yeah I can imagine it's frustrating from your side and a ton of work, everyone has their own entrenched workflows they've built up over the years. What you've got so far is amazing though, it's super fast and works well - just hasn't quite hit Kagi level for me yet. I'm not pushing anything my side, just pinging some money and waiting - it'll get there when it gets there. I really like what you guys are doing and wish there were more companies with similar philosophy.

                      2 months later

                      kulehandluke +1 on this selection of top 2 features for Vimium.

                      I love Orion (and Kagi search), but do miss having the f search functionality. I also really like (because it speeds up my workflow) navigating pages with vim keybindings (e.g. j for down, k for up, H for previous page, L for forward a page, gg to scroll to the top, etc...).

                      I recently updated to the latest Vimimum plugin (2.04) and can't seem to get it working right (on Orion 0.99.125-beta), so I've left it disabled for now and will wait. It was working for me on an older version (but I can't determine which one it was). I really appreciate all the hard and awesome work!

                          19 days later

                          kulehandluke I prefer using Firefox extensions because it's not owned by Google, and Google cannot interact with the code or modify it in any way with telemtry.

                            3 months later

                            Hi @Vlad hope you're doing well. Any luck replicating this with the steps provided by @kulehandluke ?
                            Do you need any more info to start debugging?

                            • Vlad replied to this.
                              6 days later
                              a month later

                              @kulehandluke @evelant @Fortrikka

                              Alright well I got the party started on this. The first issue is fixed. Navigating with J and K, viewing highlights with F, and a few other functions now work. It was an issue with WebKit's JSON.parse() not working the same as Chrome or Firefox's implementation.

                              There are some things still not working such as Vimium not getting focus on page load, which means it can't begin typing into the vomnibar or the / search command. Also the / search command is still not working. Something to do with the retrieval of HTML elements by the looks of it in the console.

                              You can check out the release and repository here ā†’ https://github.com/tyirvine/vimium/releases/tag/vimium-2.0.6

                              If you guys work with JavaScript at all please consider contributing fixes. Vlad seems pretty busy and fixing this is something we could totally manage. šŸ°

                              I have a pull request opened up with Vimium so any changes can be added to that and hopefully we can get them merged. If our fixes dramatically mess with Vimium then they probably won't get merged, so keep them as minimal as possible.

                                a month later

                                After some exploration, I finally found that the Vimmatic extension on Firefox can perfectly replace Viumium on Orion.

                                4 days later

                                Vimmatic worked for some shortcuts but not others. 'f" "j" and "k" work, but "?" does not, nor do "H" and "L"

                                So far the most compatible vim extension I've found for Orion is Surfingkeys (from the Chrome webstore). So far everything except moving back and forward in history seem to work, but Orion alreay has keyboard shortcuts for that.

                                  As of right now Vimium Chrome does not work at all

                                    2 months later

                                    Working in vimium (tyirvine's version) & surfingkeys (chrome version):

                                    1. Hints ('f' in vimium & surfingkeys)
                                      This is a pretty good start. This feature is one of the most important and it's working
                                    2. Navigation between tabs (Basically like cmd+shift+]/[)
                                      Also important and working.
                                    3. Omnibar (in both)
                                      Although it can't retrieve tabs icons
                                    4. Retriving the url of the current tab + editing it
                                    5. Vim editor in surfingkeys (This feaure is exclusive to surfingkeys)
                                      Maybe I didn't expect this to work šŸ™‚
                                    6. Closing a tab
                                    7. Duplicating a tab

                                    Bugs:

                                    History navigation

                                    1. History backward/forward (Basically like cmd+]/[)
                                      If you can fix something go for this one and point 2

                                    2. Reopening the most recent closed tab
                                      Also related to history navigation like point 1

                                    Keep in mind that vimium and surfingkeys have problems with point 1&2 but it is capable of showing history in the omnibar

                                    Page manipulation

                                    1. Scrolling (using J/K or D/U/E) is a bit laggy (especially in surfingkeys, may not be a bug)
                                    2. Hints doesn't work sometimes (exclusive to vimium)
                                      Occurs if you go backward in history and try to use hints (you will have to reload the page)

                                    Others

                                    1. Retriving tabs icons
                                      This is important in cases like tab switching (instead of reading the text you just look at the icon of the tab)

                                    I wish to contribute but I don't program (at least not currently), for those who want a good experience surfingkeys works better in orion than the others.

                                    The most important bugs are 1 & 2 (which are related to history) + 3 (which may be the easiest to fix)

                                    • Nya likes this.
                                    13 days later

                                    Latest update should have fixed lots of bugs related to Vimium, according to changelogs.
                                    I am currently using the extension and collecting feedback, which I will post shortly. There are plenty of features not working properly yet.
                                    Updating this comment soon with a full report

                                    shebg626 "So far everything except moving back and forward in history seem to work, but Orion alreay has keyboard shortcuts for that."

                                    This is my experience as well - although occasionally I've had Vimium stop working midway through a browsing session (e.g. 'f' does nothing) until the tab is reloaded.

                                    Vimium's (capital) H and L not supporting back/foward in history (like cmd-[ and ]) is the main annoyance for me now. It feels like this should be one of the easier bugs to fix.

                                    For what it's worth, Orion works incredibly well for me now (on desktop and iOS), so I'm sticking with it, unlike a couple of past attempts where I gave up and went back to Safari / Firefox.