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Comment by drngdds | Hacker News Reader

Navigating code using Vim keyboard commands (in Vim itself or another editor with a Vim plugin, like VS Code) is actually efficient and comfy once you become fluent with it. I also use a Vim Firefox extension to minimize my mouse use browsing the internet.

(That said, creating a fully mouseless Arch Linux desktop environment is way more hardcore than anything I want to do, especially considering the less-than-stellar stability of desktop Linux.)

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I'm using Arch for 6 years now, I never saw it crashing. It's the most stable system I've ever seen.

To me, "arch is unstable" is more an urban legend than anything else; the best is to try. And I can compare it to everything else I used for years: Win98 (oh my), winME (such a joke), win XP (way better), win 7 (really stable), Ubuntu (I had the impress to come back to win98 each time I was doing an upgrade), Debian (quite good), macOS (quite good because they don't allow you to do anything to crash the system, not nice when you have a problem). And so on.

And it's really not that difficult to install. I've one more chapter after the sample of the book I provide, and then it's done.

> I also use a Vim Firefox extension to minimize my mouse use browsing the internet.

Which one? Vimium-FF? How well does it compare to Vimium in Chromium?

I've been wanting to switch from Chromium to Firefox but can't live without Vimium. If it works well, I'll make the switch.

I've only ever used Vimium-FF, so I'm not sure how it compares to the Chromium version, but it worked well enough. Now I use Tridactyl. Check it out. It takes the concept a lot further than Vimium.

I just checked the GitHub page for Tridactyl, it seems to have so many features. Do you have any frequently used feature that only Tridactyl provides but not Vimium-FF?

sure. i think the big ones are all kind of related: - a proper commandline, not just "open url / search" field - everything's an excmd. you can compose them and write your own. you can bind them to keys or use them adhoc. - you can define excmds that execute javascript snippets - ~/.config/tridactylrc

(oops, those are supposed to be bullet points. seems it's too late to edit now.)

There was a HN post[0] recently about that, you can find more insights reading the comments. I went from vim-vixen to vimium then to tridactyl. As for features that only Tridactyl provides (things may have change in the meantime) I must say that I absolutely love their hinting mode. It's totally different from anything I have used (even qutebrowser's which is completely keyboard focused [1]). It also provides a desktop executable that allows you to edit everything in Vim. That said, I've been using it for 6 months and I know I only scratched the surface.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24615787

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636160

You should try to use qutebrowser. I quickly speak about mouseless ways to browse the internet in the book, I think qutebrowser is the best solution so far.

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