Having long been a fan of web-browsing with a keyboard—by way of the old Vimperator extension for Firefox—I have enjoyed its rebirth in the present incarnation of the Tridactyl extension.

As I’ve been adapting to the subtle differences, I’ve found myself browsing the complete list of key combos lately—trying to impress the useful combos into muscle memory. I’m going to jot some favorites here for future reference.

Quick Cookie Clean

I know this is going to seem sketchy, like I’m hiding something, but I often find myself needing to clean cookies for a web site while I’m working on it.

:sanitize cookies -t 1h

This cleans all cookies set in the last hour. Wish I could narrow it to a specific domain name match.

Adding your own helpful signout command might look like:

:command signout sanitize cookies localStorage -t 1h

Copy and Search

Never had this ability before: a combo to copy an HTML element’s text to the clipboard and then “put” it into the current tab—which will usually pass the text into your search engine. (If it’s a URL, though, it will just go there.)

;pP

The ;p allows you to yank the contents of a page element by name. And the P puts (or pipes) the clipboard contents into a “tabopen” command.

(I think of this move as the “double raspberry”—it’s the emoticon upon one’s face when landing such a maneuver.)

Pagination on Old School Forums

It just so happens that the [[ and ]] keybindings work great on BGG geeklists and Yucata.de forums. This is so much more convenient than follow on those tiny fonts they often use.

Simpler Tab Switching

I’ve bound the shifted J and K to tabprev and tabnext—hitting gtgtgtgt over and over again was a bit too much of an exercise. Perhaps I would use that hotkey more if it was possible to hold down g and hit t or T in repetition to cycle.

:bind J tabprev
:bind K tabnext

In my mind, this works well with H and L to navigate history.

(Incidentally, to pop a tab out into a new window, use the :tabdetach command. I tend to use this frequently enough that it should probably be bound—just not sure where!)

Quickmarks

This isn’t documented very well, but if you want to bookmark a site, you can supply it’s URL to the bmark comand:

:bmark https://www.kickscondor.com/

These are not kept in the same list as your Firefox bookmarks—this is a flat list rather than a hierarchy.

There are some keys bound to some bookmark calls. Allow me to clear them up:

• A bookmarks (or unbookmarks) the current URL.
• a does the same, but allows the URL to be edited first.
• M<key> gives the bookmark (at the current URL) a single character alias. To use this, you must be on the bookmarked page.
• To use the alias, prefix it with go, gn or gw—these expand to open, tabopen and windowopen. (So: gwp will open a new window with the URL aliased as “p”.)

These three commands are created when you run the M command. So, to remove these commands, you’ll need to do individually: :reset gnp and so on.