DruiD628 :: Tech Tips  :: DruiD628's vimperator

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Are you a big fan of Firefox?
Are you like me and a hardcore vi fanatic?
Have you ever been working in, notepad, Word, WordPerfect or any other application... such as Firefox, remember Firefox, when suddenly you have a line of  "j's" "k's"? I have that problem a lot. Well at least for Firefox, there is a cure. There is an AddOn for Firefox called vimperator.

http://vimperator.mozdev.org/

Now,  this comes with a bit of a learning curve. Do not think you can just plop it on Firefox and go to work. You will probably experience culture shock and will need CPR. Me personally I like my address, menu and tool -bars, I don't care much for the bookmarks toolbar, kinda gets in the way, imo. Anyway, once you install vimperator and restart Firefox you will see the a page full of web and no bars... fear not there is a fix! Hit <Escape> type the following (minus quotes):
":set guioptions=mT"

They come back!

 
Ok next order of business is to create a .vimperatorrc file in the %USERPROFILE% directory, below is an example of mine.

:set guioptions=mT
:set titlestring=DruiD628
:set stal=1
:set vb
:set pps=3

You've already  seen what the first line does, let me fill you in on the rest.

'titlestring' is what normally, in Firefox, reads as "Mozilla Firefox" in the TitleBar of your Firefox window for example if you were viewing my site it might look like this: "DruiD628.com - Mozilla Firefox." This allows you to change that.

The stal line is about the tab line and if it is showed all the time (2), just when more than one tab is open (1),  or never at all (0). 

VB is a visual bell, honestly I cannot remember what the visual bell is I just remember until I set this, I seriously considered uninstalling vimperator.

Lastly, pps defines the actions of pop-up windows. For example they can be forced to always open in the current tab (0) [DruiD628: "YIKES!!"], they can simply always open a new tab (1),  if the pop-up window has specific dimensions then it will open up in a new window (2), or they will always open up a new window (3) [DruiD628: "Kinda messy but I like it this way, for now at least"]. 

This information can always be found, once vimperator is installed by typing :help and as always more information about vimperator can be found at the website: http://vimperator.mozdev.org/

Enjoy!