This page: Home » » Ratpoison and Vimperator

Vimperator with ratpoison

Living without a mouse

Vimperator is for webbrowsing what is ratpoison for conquering the desktop.

Mousefree computing rocks. Text mode applications rock. But not all the time. Once in a while you want to visit websites with meaningfull pictures. On those days vimperator comes to the rescue!

Ratpoison is a great windowmanager

The ratpoison window manager is awesome. I started using ratpoison in march 2005. This means that I have been using ratpoison for 4 years now. I never looked back. In the beginning I used tmpwm to temporarely switch to another window manager to use Gimp. I have become accustomed enough with ratpoison and I on my newer boxes I don't even bother to install another window manager.

Benefits of ratpoison

Works completele mouseless.
It takes only keyboard commands to use ratpoison. This is fast, efficient and keeps your wrists healthy.
Very light-weight
Ratpoison has a small footprint, consumes much less CPU-cycles and is also friendly for your memory. In short, ratpoison goes easy on the resources.
No waist of pixels
No windowbordes, buttons or other window-decorations. Ratpoison gives you value for your hard earned money. Make every pixel count!
No waist of time
You will work twice as efficient by using ratpoison. You have never switched faster to another window.
Same keybindings as GNU Screen
If you know how to use GNU screen, then you can work with ratpoision immediately. If not, shame on you. Start learning to use GNU Screen!

Ratpoison is the best window manager for netbooks

Because no pixels gets lost ratpoison is the best window manager for netbooks.

Own a netbook? Run ratpoison on it!

Vimperator: the webbrowser with an attitude

Vimpartor is keyboard-driven. The keybindings are inspired by vim. If you know how to use vim, then you can work with vimperator immediately. If not, shame on you. Start learning to use vim !

Vimperator makes Firefox work and look like vim. The famous hjkl motion keys work in vimperator, just like <shift-G> and gg.

Getting started with vimperator

Here are some basic commands to get you up and running.

o <url> opens url in current tab
t <url> opens url in a new tab
:tabopen <url> opens url in a new tab
:tabclose closes the current tab :)
gt go to next tab
gT go to previous tab
g0 go to first tab
g$ go to last tab
h-j-k-l all work the same as in vi(m)
H (<shift-h>) and L (<shift-l>) go back and forth in your history. So H replaces your back-button.
gg and <shift-G> go to top or bottom of the current webpage
/ search in the current webpage

Some other handy commands

O (<shift-o>) edit the current URL. This is a very handy command that is used a lot!
gu go one directory up
gU go to root directory
gh go to your homepage
gH go to your homepage in a new tab
zi and zo zoom in and zoom out
zI zoom in with 100%
zz reset zoom
:set guioptions=mT put the toolbars back in sight.
m is for menubar, T is for toolbar, b is for bookmarkbar.
o search <term> opens default searchengine and query for <term>
:vie view source code of the current document
:vie <url> view source code of the document under <url>
:e reload document