The things using Vi, Vim and Neovim for 25+ years will do to a person is un-thinkable and horrific.
Every couple years I try to find a good Vi-mode plugin for my applications/browser with limited success. Having tried the likes of Vimium, Tridactyl, Vimperator, Dooms, Spacemacs, vscodevim, ideavim. None of them ever felt quite right, and just seemed to be bolted on.
Nyxt
WTF’s is Nyxt (Next Browser)?
In legends it is told that Athena had a powerful headache from using Internet Explorer. For months, the pressure built in her head, until one day, with a loud explosion, Nyxt sprang directly from her forehead. All of Athena’s wisdom and cunning was imbued into the vessel known as Nyxt.
Stolen from Mount Olympus by Prometheus himself, Nyxt is the titan’s gift to humanity! Use it wisely, the power of the Internet is yours!
OK so there’s that… Pulled directly from their site. I’ll attempt to do a better job describing it, at least from my perspective.
Features
- Modify all the things, including itself
- All of the key-binds
- REPL
- Some familiar concepts to Emacs and Vim (Buffers and Windows instead of tabs)
Aimed at power users Nyxt comes built-in with 3 different sets of modify-able keybindings Common User Access (CUA), Emacs and of course Vi.
Not only are the key-bindings user modifiable, so is just about all the functionality of Nyxt. Allowing you to essentially hack away at the browser while it’s running which is pretty cool.
Not many browsers come with a REPL built-in (I’m not counting the JS console built into most browsers for the sake of argument since it’s not readily usable to modify the browser itself, as it’s mostly relegated to modifying the look and feel and not actual functionality).
With a recent release of 2.2.0, I decided to give it a spin. While I do not consider myself a browser power-user, I do like the idea of a browser with built in Vi bindings (and not some bolted on plugin).
All the standard mouse controls are available like you would have access to with any other browser. However it really starts coming into it’s own when using it the way it was designed, with the keyboard (in my case the vi key-binds).
Installation
With the new release, and of course being on Arch someone in the AUR‘s has created a Nyxt repo, which has the latest version in there. So the installation was a breeze.
yay -S nyxt
Mash enter a bunch accepting all the defaults, and you’ve got yourself a nice new browser to fiddle with.
First usage
At first startup, I mashed a bunch of Vi keys that I would have tried to “guess” would potentially work, but no luck.
Eventually I mashed : to enter command mode and typed help and that worked.
:help
From here you’re greeted with a very fancy help page seen below.
From here you can click (since you don’t know to navigate by Elements yet!) on the Common settings button and set your key-binds to Vi mode if your so inclined as well as a few other options.
With our selected control-scheme in place, the List Bindings on the previous Help page will now reflect our current setup.
There is an overwhelming amount of functionality accessible through these bindings. So I will just outline a few to get you able to browse and shuffle through buffers etc, enough to get comfortable with some key based browsing.
Some helpful keys to know
: <—
Yep that’s a colon, probably the most important command to learn till you get the hang of the others.
It allows you to browse the list of built-in commands and their key combinations using the arrow keys to navigate through them (or the vi movement keys of course).
<ESC>
Just like in Vi, ESC is handy to get out of insert mode. Sometimes mashing it a couple times is required to back out of some modes etc.
Ctrl-l, Ctrl-L
Finally this is how we browse to sites. With the lower case l loading the site in the current buffer, or upper case L loading the site in a new buffer.
Type in your url, and press enter and off to the races you go. Most navigation can be done with the regular combinations of mouse scrolling / page up / down or arrow or vi movement keys.
#protip
Automagically search using a prefix of ddg to search DuckDuckGo. You can also add other search-engines, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Ctrl-j
Navigating to a specific part of the page, or clicking a link (with your keyboard), this is accomplished by pressing Control-j. Once pressed, a bunch of letter combinations will appear on all the clickable elements on the page. If you type in any of those combinations, you will then be able to essentially click it.
Don’t forget to press i to enter insert mode if you selected an input box so that you can type into it :)
H
This is your Back button.
(Ctrl-w, Ctrl-w) and (Ctrl-W)
These combinations will open other Nyxt windows, and upper case W will close it, similar to interacting with splits in Vim.
(Ctrl-x Ctrl-k) or D
These will allow you to destroy buffers / close them.
Z Z, Ctrl-x Ctrl-c, C-q
Quit
With those commands you will be off to a great start in using Nyxt and build up familiarity. There is also a built in tutorial and the documentation is pretty straight forward.
Bonus: Importing your bookmarks
You can also import your bookmarks into Nyxt using the following command.
:import-bookmarks-from-html
You will then type in the path to your exported bookmarks etc.
You can bring up your newly imported bookmarks using the show-bookmarks-panel command.
Conclusion
Hopefully Nyxt keeps getting better, I did run into a couple issues, that already seem to be documented in their github issues page.
Let me know if you have found a good usable Vi-mode application. Always interested in using that old built up muscle memory for something.
And it’s refreshing to see folks building a new application from the ground up rather than a plugin to an existing application allowing for much better user interactions to be dictated by the users themselves vs the frameworks of the existing applications.
As always let me know your thoughts on the subject.