What happened to the letter hints in pre-1.x Vimperator?

Changeset 35bc5033661 reintroduced character hints as an option, so they will be available again in the next release (2.4).

(The new hints system is actually more advanced than simple numbering. For text links, for example, you can begin typing the text within the link. As you type, the numbers assigned to each remaining matching link will change until either you stop typing or a unique link is found. Please read the hints section of tutorial.html (:help tutorial) and try this a few times for yourself before deciding to go back; a lot of thought and consideration went into this new hint system.

For those who prefer the old way, there is a setting 'hintchars': :set hintchars=asdfhjkl should do it for most users.

How can I open bookmarks in the :bmarks results?

:bmarks is intended for displaying bookmarks rather than opening them. Though its cohort, :bmarks! will open all matching bookmarks, :open is a better choice (see the 'complete' option). Alternatively, you may click the titles of matching bookmarks, or use extended hints (;o, for instance) to open the results.

How can I select items from the :open prompt after I press <Tab>

You can filter items to open by just typing :open filter<Tab>. If the first item isn't what you desire, keep pressing <Tab> or <S-Tab> until you get to the entry that you want.

Keyboard shortcuts in sites like gmail and google reader don't work. Vimperator intercepts keystrokes in some text areas.

You can temporarily disable Vimperator's keyboard shortcuts by typing, <S-Esc>. Pressing <S-Esc> again will return you to NORMAL mode and re-enable your normal keyboard shortcuts. <Ins> is also an alias for this, for those who have a proper (non-laptop) keyboard.

Another extension stopped working when using Vimperator

TODO! See the list of [wiki:Vimperator/Wiki#IncompatibleExtensions Incompatible Extensions]

How can I change or add key bindings?

Vimperator supports Vim's :map, :noremap, :unmap and :mapclear commands. To read about them, type:

:help :map

Does Vimperator support Iceweasel?

Iceweasel is just a rebranded Firefox, so it works fine.

I heard a feature was added but I don't see it in my release!

It's possible the feature has been added to the current development version of Vimperator, but has not yet been released. If you can't wait, you can try checking out the source or a nightly snapshot.

Why doesn't <C-[> work for <Esc>? (Mac OS X)

From the mailing list post:

The following applies only to very recent builds of Firefox 3 for Mac OS X. It
does not apply to other platforms.  In very recent FF3/OSX builds, changes in
the Cocoa key event processing has prevented Vimperator from successfully
translating <C-[> keypresses to <Esc>. ... the changes to the Cocoa code were
apparently deliberate, but whether this new behavior is a bug or a misfeature
has not yet been determined. 

A patch can be found at the same URL above.

How do I prevent the session being saved when closing the window with my window manager?

The session saving behavior when closing Firefox with the window manager, or File->Exit, is to use the session saving behavior from the last time it was closed with a Vimperator command. So to prevent session saving one can close Vimperator once with ZQ or :qall after which a standard window close operation will not save the session.

Why don't my keybindings work in Gmail?

Gmail's user interface makes extensive use of iframes. In Vimperator, the top-level frame is focused by default. To focus the content iframe, simply press <Tab>.

How do I enable pass-through mode only for certain sites (tabs)?

Use the LocationChange autocommand event. Then whenever you switch tabs, the condition will be evaluated and the correct value for modes.passAllKeys set automatically.

Examples (see ':help autocmd-examples'):

Enable pass-through mode on all Google sites:

:autocmd LocationChange .* js modes.passAllKeys = /google\.com/.test(buffer.URL)

Enable pass-through mode on some Google sites:

:autocmd LocationChange .* js modes.passAllKeys = /(www|mail)\.google\.com/.test(buffer.URL)

Note that the two commands above are just two stand-alone examples and won't work properly together. For more discussion and other tips, see here: http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/vimperator/2009-April/003993.html

What do the "[+-♥]" symbols in the statusbar mean?

These indicate that you can move backwards and forwards through the tabs session history, or that the current page is bookmarked.

Can I use regular expressions to search?

As per :help pattern.html, Firefox does not provide native regular expression support for searching, so Vimperator will probably never do this natively. That being said, there is an extension to add it that meshes well with Vimperator. Here are the steps to enable regular expression searching:

1. Install the /Find Bar/ extension from

http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/FindBarRX

2. Restart Firefox. 3. Get the regular find bar. On the Mac this is Apple-f, other places

iCtrl-f (the i means "pass next key through to Firefox").

4. Check the regular expression box, and close the find bar. 5. The setting will stick, so that searching with / will use regular expressions. Don't forget to escape characters like '/' and '.'.

NB: The /Find Bar/ extension is no longer actively developed. There has been at least one case of it causing Firefox to crash on startup. ''Caveat emptor''.

How can I hide the command line when it's not in use?

The maine-coon plugin provides this functionality among other related features. Note this also requires _libly.js.

How do I change the status bar font? Using :highlight doesn't seem to work!

Try something like this:

:style -name=yourUglyStatusline * #liberator-statusline { font-family: sans-serif !important; } 

How do I change the default search engine?

The default search engine can be set to any of the search engines listed in

:dialog searchengines

or to any keyword search bookmark. For further details see:

:help 'defsearch'

Can I use keybindings to interact with Flash-based sites like YouTube?

In general, once a Flash object has focus Vimperator loses the ability to process key press events. This is a limitation of the Mozilla platform. To restore control to Vimperator you can click on another part of the page to remove focus from the Flash object. Assigning a window manager key binding to perform this task is the best approach.

However, several sites offer a JavaScript API to their Flash viewers and these can be used by Vimperator plugins to provide keyboard control and more. For example, this plugin provides a range of Ex commands for interacting with YouTube.

There is also the flashblock Vimperator plugin providing means for enabling and disabling Flash using commands or whitelist.