Using a web browser’s keyboard controls can speed up web surfing significantly. But most web browsers limit those keyboard shortcuts, and do not offer options to add additional hotkeys to speed up specific operations that are not supported by default.

Vimium is a Google Chrome extension that adds a few dozen keyboard controls to the browser to speed up web surfing.

The controls become available directly after installation, and can be used to achieve various goals in the Google browser.

It is for instance possible to press h, j, k or l to scroll left, down, up or right, press gg to automatically scroll to the top, or Shift-G to reach the bottom of the active page.

More useful than those commands that are already available, albeit set to different keys are the additional options that are provided by Vimium

Chrome users with Vimium installed can press t to open a new tab, d to close the active tab, u to restore the last closed tab and Shift-J or Shift-K to navigate quickly between tabs.

That’s just a sample of the possibilities that the extension offers. Other commands of interest are Shift-H, and Shift-L, that allow to go back or forward in history. This especially is useful for users who usually right-click to do that, as the right-click menu does not always offer that functionality.

The key r reloads the current page, and y copies the url to the clipboard.

A complete list of commands is available at the Google Chrome Extensions gallery page. It is possible to pause the extension by pressing i, which ignores all hotkeys until Esc is hit.

Vimium can speed up standard web surfing processes in the Chrome browser. Firefox find in Vimperator a similar extension for their browser.

© Martin for gHacks Technology News, 2010.