“Vim”. It will ring a bell if you have done some computer programming almost 2 decades ago? Vim is a keyboard-based text editor to edit computer programs in Unix. Purely with keyboards, no mouse.
Vimium = Vim + Chromium. It’s just adopting the editing methods of ‘Vim’ on Chrome as a technique to navigating websites faster with keyboard and eliminating mouse. Vimium is a Chrome extension that brings that feature to Chrome. Two years back I wrote about Vimium on an article on ‘How to browse like a hacker‘.
Since the time I switched to Mac, a few things kept me switching from Chrome to Safari. One significant reason is the lack of Vimium like an extension for Safari.
Recently I found the port of Vimium to Safari based on original Vimium source codes. Vim + Safara = Vimari. A company owned by Daniel Compton from New Zealand successfully ported Vimium for Safari. Thanks, Daniel. Now I can browse like a geek in my Safari.
Why Vimari/Vimium?
It saves me a lot of time, really a lot when I use the keyboard to navigate websites. Dragging the mouse all over the screen to click a specific link is a bit of labour (I know, it’s an exaggeration). Vimium saves a fraction of seconds to a few seconds every time I use to click a link in a website. These fraction of seconds add up and saves me at least 10 minutes a day.
It may not look like a big deal. It’s not about the time saved. It’s about the speedy interaction, the gap between my mind to click a link and my hand click link decreases. This kind of helps me to keep me in the flow of my cognitive state when I browse with Vimium. You have to use it on your own to feel, how seamless it is to use, how naturally you can click links and browse. You have to feel it.
You can download and install Vimari, the extension for Safari from here. Safari is not yet my primary browser. For now, availability of Vimari became a good reason to consider Safari for all time use. By the way, at the time of writing this, I am still with Chrome as my first-browser.