Firemacs: Emacs keybindings for FireFox

http://www.mew.org/~kazu/proj/firemacs/en/

by brudgers • 11 years ago

47 39 11 years ago

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

Why this over vimperator?

teddyh2• 11 years ago

Because, (unlike what reading HN could lead you to believe), not everyone uses VI or Vim – some, even many, prefer Emacs.

userbinator• 11 years ago

Of the people I know who prefer Emacs, what they like is the extensibility and customisation, and not necessarily the keybindings.

In fact I'm almost willing to bet that if it was initially designed so as not to require pressing simultaneous keys but only in sequence (like the mechanism used for navigating menus in Windows with the Alt key), Emacs would become even more popular. For example, in many applications I find it much easier and faster to type Alt,F,S to save instead of Ctrl+S.

greggarious• 11 years ago

In all seriousness, I was under the impression Emacs was more popular, hence us VIM users being a bit more vocal. It's like the Ron Paul of text editors.

techwizrd• 11 years ago

Have you tried VimFx? It's one of the first addons I download (other than uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, and RES). I like that it's lighter than Pentadactyl/Vimperator and it doesn't break Firefox's default behavior.

Chrome users can download Viumium[1] which does the exact same thing for Chrome.

0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/vimfx/ 1: https://vimium.github.io/

bjwbell• 11 years ago

I tried these for a while.

It confused my muscle memory more to have almost but not quite emacs behavior in the browser vs standard browser keyboard shortcuts.

jlarocco• 11 years ago

That's been my biggest problem with every wannabe Emacs keybinding I've ever tried.

Even in OS X, I love that I can use the Emacs cursor movement keys everywhere, but even after years of using it, I still occasionally start using other Emacs shortcuts before realizing it's not doing what I expect.

I actually think it's easier to just add more to Emacs and use the keybindings there, than it is to add proper Emacs bindings to other software :-)

catern• 11 years ago

I much prefer Keysnail: https://github.com/mooz/keysnail

avtar• 11 years ago

I've been using Keysnail and it seems to provide Emacs keybindings for pretty much any task. It also seems to be actively maintained.

http://blog.binchen.org/posts/use-firefox-in-emacs-way-3.htm...

https://github.com/mooz/keysnail

codemac• 11 years ago

elisp : emacs :: javascript : firefox+keysnail

BaryonBundle• 11 years ago

Conkeror is a standalone browser (not to be confused with KDE's Konqueror) I've been using with a similar mission, though I look forward to trying this out and take advantage of FireFox's technologies (debug, pdf.js integration, etc.)

qwertyboy• 11 years ago

Boy, do I have good news for you: http://conkeror.org/PDFViewer

Conkeror is so much Firefox, that you can easily fit the former with most things that work with the latter, including the built-in PDF extension. As a matter of fact, the Conkeror "binary" is just a shell script that launches Firefox or xul-runner with the proper config (something like: firefox -app /usr/share/conkeror/application.ini).

Also worth noting is that Conkeror was the original inspiration for vimperator (and thus for uzbl, dwb, luakit and the likes - all very splendid and worthwhile projects), and that this message is written on an editor spawned by conkeror (which, surprisingly enough, happens to be vim).

scottjad• 11 years ago

Btw you can easily connect the Firefox debugger to a Conkeror instance.

http://conkeror.org/Debugging?highlight=%28debugging%29#Debu...

kinleyd• 11 years ago

+1 for Conkeror - close enough to emacs on the browser for me!

entropie• 11 years ago

Why cant we have this for chrome?

eeZi• 11 years ago

Lack of APIs, maybe?

tangue• 11 years ago

I tried these things but I found that when I'm working on Emacs and have to use a browser(Stack overflow etc ) M-x eww is less disruptive.

ams61102• 11 years ago

Yeah that's nice for specific cases where you just need to see the text (and the site doesn't require JavaScript for that).

But beyond that, I can see it being really nice for the muscle memory keystrokes for cursor movement, marking text, copy/paste, etc. being the same. I'm definitely going to give these a try.

brudgers• 11 years ago

StackOverflow? There's a mode for that.

https://github.com/vermiculus/sx.el

wiredfool• 11 years ago

I'd rather have them for thunderbird.

jf• 11 years ago

It looks like keysnail has a plugin for Thunderbird.

tmtxt• 11 years ago

I would prefer Conkeror since it allows me to programagically extend it. I can do nearly anything that I can do in xulrunner with conkeror, not just the emacs key bindings

mhd• 11 years ago

I really should be doing this, now that I'm on Linux a lot. Way less print dialogs to dismiss…

toolslive• 11 years ago

for me, firefox is under control (I use keysnail) anybody succeeded in sanitizing google spreadsheets and skype?

jwdunne2• 11 years ago

What would be really nice is a Firefox/Chrome window hosted inside an Emacs frame, which would be controllable via an elisp api so I can bind hotkeys to control it.

Would make web development easier by keeping web based documentation look ups right there in Emacs, plus could have a window dedicated to viewing your work as you edit, especially when working on frontend stuff.

unknownzero• 11 years ago

I've wanted this for just about forever as well. There is one project I've noticed on the EmacsWiki - http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WebKit . I haven't tried getting it up and running yet, would be curious if anyone here has.

jwdunne2• 11 years ago

Installing dependencies... will take some time but will report back if I get it working.

chimeracoder• 11 years ago

If any Vim users are feeling generous, fret not - Vim bindings for Firefox exist as well!

Vimperator has been the go-to for a long time, with VimFX and Pentadactyl as alternatives. However, none of these support e10s (multiprocess Firefox), and the migration path and timeline is unclear.

I wrote a very slimmed down alternative that does support e10s Firefox, named Electrovim[0]. It has far fewer features than Vimperator, but it includes the minimum subset that my workflow required before I could enable e10s on my own machine.

[0] https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/electrovim

mooreds• 11 years ago

Oooh, thanks!

Mauricio_• 11 years ago

I can't imagine using Chrome without Vimium anymore. Even if it's just for the f key, to open links without using the mouse. That's the only key binding that matters

Firemacs: Emacs keybindings for FireFox

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