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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

The home-row hints are much better than the number hints that conkeror and vimperator give you. Although I did get really good at typing numbers, thanks to conkeror.

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In my opinion, Vimperator's hints are better. Vimperator only uses numbers for hints because letters are used to narrow down the results. If you are on a page with a lot of hints, just start typing a few letters contained in the link. All of the hints that don't match will disappear, greatly reducing the clutter on the screen and often only a single digit is needed.

Also, as I mentioned in my (redundant) comment further up, if your choices are narrowed down to one link, it's auto selected.

This is the one feature I saw that was a marked improvement over vimperator.

However, there are still too many small annoyances like not being able to open a new location in a new tab with a single command.

Hitting T and then typing into the address bar isn't fast enough? How could that even be sped up?

Haven't tried it myself, but I assume he means opening up a link (via hint) in a new tab.

Except that's even easier, because it's just Shift-F.

When I hit 't', the new tab opens not with the default New Tab page where focus is on the address bar, but with my home page (iGoogle), where the focus is on Google's search field.

This means I can't just hit 't' and type a URL. A small nit-pick I know. I've just looked at the source, and it seems a problem with Google's API call (chrome.tabs.create). It is supposed to default to the New Tab page unless a URL is provided (and vimium does not provide a URL). On my install the home page is opened instead, so this is not Vimium's fault (and I'm very happy with it thus far).

Won't CTRL+T (or CMD+T) open a new tab and focus the URL bar?

If I'm remembering correctly, vimperator used to use a similar system. I think so that you could narrow the link choices by typing.

It does still use the "type to narrow" system. If it gets one match, it automatically selects that link. Also, as you type, it filters to only links that have your search term in them, and adjusts the numbering as well.

Sorry, my comment was unclear. I meant that vimperator changed in order to make use of the type to narrow system, which was not available with the previous one.

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