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Comment by jodoherty | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons I wish all standard text controls came with an optional VI mode.

This is one of the reasons I'm happy to be Emacs and OS X user at the same time. Most of system input fields support main Emacs' shortcuts.

It's All Text! achieves pretty much that by letting you write any text in your editor of choice (which can be gvim).

Similar extensions exist for Chrome, but they require running a server in the background since Chrome doesn't let them execute external processes.

And one step further is to have vi-like binding for navigating the web, switching tabs etc.

Vimperator and its recent fork Pentadactyl do this for Firefox, there's similar (though when I looked into it, less advanced) add-ons for Chrome/ium too, I think the one I tried was called Vimium.

I was worried using such an invasive add-on would trip me up with Firefox's new rapid release schedule, particularly as I jumped to Pentadactyl because it supported version 4 first/better) but I'm up to Firefox 6 with no problems as yet.

My first browser was Netscape Navigator and today but obvious I'm on firefox. The only reason I am still stuck and not moved to chrome/ium is due to Vimperator. Your comment was a validation to me :) . I have nightmares that with chrome/ium becoming so popular, I might lose Vimperator.....

Thanks. I think it'd still be useful though to shift from the paradigm of everything goes in my text editor to the paradigm that my text editor is already in everything.

If you're on OSX, you can use Keymando(http://keymando.com) to get vi-mode inputs. Check out Steve Losh's vi-mode plugin at https://github.com/keymando

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