Control Firefox with Keyboard Using the VimFx Extension

Back in the 1970s, there was a very popular text editor for UNIX and it was called vi. When Linus Torvalds revived UNIX and the new avatar was named Linux in his honor, developers came up with an updated version of vi and called it vim. Just like the vi editor, the vim editor does not require any input from the mouse. You can do all the editing only using your keyboard. And if you have worked with vim before, then you would love VimFx extension for Firefox.

The VimFx extension for Firefox allows you to control everything using only the keyboard. Now you can give some rest to your mouse and work through all the websites using just the keyboard. However, the VimFx extension has a steep learning curve if you have never used vim or vi before.

VimFx

After you have installed the VimFx extension, you will see the VimFx button in the toolbar. You can click on this button to open a full chart of all the keyboard shortcuts possible through the VimFx extension. But even looking at this big chart, you may be confused because of the way it displays special key combination. For example, it won’t say “Ctrl+Escape”, but instead it would say <c-escape>. In general, the lowercase c in front of a key stands for the Ctrl key, the lowercase s when used as prefix stands for the Shift key and the lowercase a stands for the Alt key.

Once you have this knowledge, you can slowly start using the shortcut keys to scroll the webpages, open websites, paste URLs, close and open tabs, open links, search for text on a webpage, copy-paste text and more. You can also put the VimFx in three special modes – caret mode that lets you select and copy text, hints mode that allows you to click objects using hint keys and the ignore mode that basically disables VimFx.

Conclusion: VimFx can be used to control almost everything in Firefox using just your keyboard. It can be a productivity booster extension if you know how to work fast with your keyboard.

You can get the VimFx extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimfx/.