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[Solved] Issues With Vimperator On Firefox

Luca Sommacal -

If you:

  • are using Mozilla Firefox®,
  • have installed the addons Status-4-Evar and Vimperator,
  • are experiencing issues with the auto command LocationChange of the latter,

this post is for you! If you don't meet previous points, well, go on read anyway :-)

TL;DR

You simply have to remove and then install again Status-4-Evar. This trick works both on Linux and Windows.

Full Story

I've been using Firefox since it's first release. And from that point it has become my preferred browser on every system I've used (Windows, Linux and Android). I've seen it change many times, nearly always in a good manner.

The only situation I remember I've been a little disappointed is when the status bar has been removed. Luckily there was an add-on to restore the lost functionality: Status-4-Evar.

The years passed by and lately I started to fall in love with Vim. If you don't know, Vim is a powerful highly customizable lightweight text editor that allows you to never take your hands off the keyboard. It's slightly difficult to understand at first, but once you have passed the first week, your hands will automatically type the commands for you.

Basically I'm a Vim enthusiastic, so you can imagine how I felt when I've discovered that there is a Firefox extension that can add my favorite editor commands to my favorite browser. This addon is: Vimperator and, such as Vim, it can be highly customized.

One day I decided that for Feedly, the default keybinding of Vimperator had to be disabled, because it was interfering with Feedly own shortcuts. It is as simple as adding the following two rows to the .vimperatorrc file:

autocmd LocationChange .* js modes.passAllKeys = false
autocmd LocationChange feedly\\.com js modes.passAllKeys = true

Everything worked fine until few days ago, when, after an upgrade of Vimperator, it stopped working. I don't want to bore you with the list of the tries I've made. To make a long story short, disabling Status-4-Evar make everything working fine again.

But, damn, I like that extension, so, after some more tries, I've understood that Status-4-Evar must be installed after every Vimperator update, in order to make everything work fine.

Update 04-Mar-18

With the introduction of the new engine called Quantum in Firefox 57, Vimperator is no longer working. At present I'm using Vim Vixen.

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