 So if someone forced me to choose what my favorite Firefox extension was Chances are I wouldn't really be able to pick although it probably lean towards simple tab groups But I've talked about that many times on the channel. I've kind of Overworn it a little bit. I've overdone it a bit because I like it so much So I'm not going to talk about that today even though. I you know, definitely could Instead I'm going to be talking about my second favorite type of plugin And that is a type of plug-in that adds VIM controls VIM key bindings to Firefox now these Extensions are fairly common. There are several different ones that exist both for Firefox and Chromium based browsers So if you're not using Firefox, you can go to your Chrome based browser and find one that does this You know, there's Vimeo and there's Surfing keys and a whole bunch of different other ones that you can use no matter what browser you're on But there was one suggested to me a few days ago called Tridactyl and this is a fairly new Firefox extension. I'm not exactly sure how old it is. So don't quote me on the new part But it's definitely new to me and it is a VIM Plug-in for Firefox and one of the reasons why I like it so much is because it does a really good job of emulating the UI of Cute browser now if you've ever used Q browser before you know that it's not a very Modern-looking UI. It's not meant to be but it is very nerdy and I like it So Tridactyl emulates that UI fairly well and it is super powerful now. It does most everything That every other VIM extension does for your browser it adds the movements it adds think you know Modes and things like this to your browser So you can do things with the VIM keys and with them motions and VIM commands Just like you would if you were inside of them So it's not special in that it does things extraordinarily different from every other VIM plug-in, but It does them in such a way that it makes it feel kind of like you're using VIM so Today we're gonna be taking a look at Tridactyl and we're gonna go through the features the things that I like the things that I don't like and So on so let's go ahead and jump in so let's go ahead and start off with the basics Let's just say you're here browsing your favorite website And you're reading the latest blog posts on your favorite website and you want to move around so J and K Will move you up and down and if you are zoomed in far enough to the point where you can scroll side to side You can also use H and L to scroll side to side. You can use capital H and capital L to move between your history So if I do shift H, it'll take me back one shift L will take me forward So the standard VIM movements are here. I can also do something like 10 J and it will go down 10 lines I can do 10 K and it'll go up 10 lines Now one of the things that I don't like just off the top of the bat And I'm not sure if you can change this we'll talk about customization here in a little bit But one of the things that I don't really care for is the number of lines that it actually moves when you're using the VIM keys So as far as I can tell it looks like it moves about Five or six or seven lines of time every time you use J and K to move down if you did if you did 10 K it's actually going to take you all the way to the top of the page if the page is pretty short instead of just taking You up 10 lines. That's kind of annoying now One thing that I will say about this and we'll talk about customization later Like I said is that this is super customizable just like them So in theory you should be able to change that I'm just unsure how And we'll talk about the reason why I'm unsure how in a little bit So the standard VIM navigation stuff is here works really really well But every VIM plugin for your browser does basically the same thing So that's not obviously all that exciting where I find tridactyl really cool is with the UI that it comes with So if I wanted to open up a new Tab I could just hit T and it would bring up the UI now I could then search for something so I could search for the Linux Cast and it would take me to a Google search for the Linux cast in a new tab or you know I could open up a new tab that I say I already know of so I could go to the verge Com like so and it would take me to the verge.com although for whatever reason It didn't load. Did I mistype it? Maybe it's just because there's not a www there on the verge.com and it just assumes that there is maybe the verges is you know not Actually online or something. Let me open up. Let me open up another one. So if I just wanted to open something Let's just go and try this again. So T and then go to say Throt com Like so yeah that worked out fine I'm not maybe the verges just down and you know whatever but so you get the idea right the UI is where Try to act all kind of shine so tab open works if you wanted to open one right in this tab You could do that so I could just open the Linux cast org here Just like I did before you know and it just works really well now Obviously, you can also do things like follow links So if you wanted to use the hint mode which is brought up with the letter f It'll show you letters on every link that's on the page and you just press that letter to follow it So if I wanted to follow say I'm going to learn Python that my blog posts there It would then use that by me pressing the letter y that is very similar to other plugins One thing I do like about it is that it's not as messy. So if you go where to go to YouTube comm and then press the f mode there and to get into the hint mode with f Well, it definitely does have a lot of stuff there, right? It's still messy because there's a ton of links on this page That's for sure. I like this particular Set up a little bit better because it does a better job of making them stand out Most of the other plugins that do this tend to use a yellow background And it just doesn't really pop for me all that much and they all blend together and half the time they overlap now Some things here are overlapping as well. So I can't say that this is a hundred percent perfect So like who the hell even knows what is going on up here in the logo because there should be only one link there But it definitely has like 12 so not sure what's going on there Probably going to blame YouTube on that and not try to act all but the point is is that you know There are some messy spots on here But for whatever reason it does feel like the links that is highlighting here are a little bit better Not say organized, but kind of better put together. Let's just put it that way I just like it just a little bit better than any other plugin that I've really tried They all do basically the same thing, but this one is just a little bit better in my opinion So let's go ahead then and talk about modes because the big thing about Vim type plugins for your browser is that it adds extra functionality to your browser specifically regarding keyboard motion and keyboard usage Everything is keyboard centric It's so you can use your browser like you were in Vim where it is not really Accepted that you'd you ever use your mouse, right? You don't want to use your mouse in Vim Obviously, there are those people who do but you know those people should probably go use nano I'm not judging. Well, I'm judging a little bit, but let's move on So there are several different modes inside of try to act all obviously the one that you're going to see the most of is Normal mode in normal mode the Vim keys work So you can just you know scroll up and down just like you would in Vim you can go back and forth just like I showed you before everything in normal mode work So if you wanted to search you could hit the slash key and it would bring up the search Normal mode also allows you to instantaneously get into command mode Which is brought up by hitting the colon key and that brings up the commands now. They call this ex commands I'm not sure what the ex commands actually stands for this is called ex mode or command mode Maybe ex is actually something that Vim uses as well And that's just like an alternate name and I just don't know it. It's possible. I do not Shockingly, I do not know everything Despite what some of the comment there's on my youtube channel seem to think that I know everything which is Obviously not true. Anyways, it's getting a little bitter there. It's okay. I'm moving on So this is command mode and it will show you the commands that are available to Tridactyl for you to do certain things So for example, if you wanted to make it so that try to act will didn't work on a certain URL You could do colon blacklist ad like so Oops, actually got to actually remove add something to that So colon blacklist add and then the URL that you wanted to do so like youtube.com and then enter and then If once you reload the page, I think you have to reload the page So we'll do this what you'll see down here in the corner is that it actually It's there if you sit down in the corner It says ignore that means that this URL is ignored and now if I wanted to use Mike Vim keys doesn't work I'm trying to get into the hint hint the hint mode where which would bring up the Links and stuff like that. You can't do that because you've added it to the blacklist now Whether or not there's a way to add an actual list somewhere like in a configuration file I'm not actually sure and that'll be brought up when I get into the documentation here in a few minutes because the documentation is a mess and It's not fantastic. So it's really hard to find out what's actually possible It's also very technical which is a downside. So we'll talk about that later But just when I say I don't know how to do something. It's not because it's not possible would try to act Let's just mean that the documentation is kind of all over the place and very technical So I couldn't find that particular feature But they really from what I've seen so far in terms of customization everything they want you to everything you can customize you can customize inside of command mode and the thing about command mode is that if you have a Website that has been ignored you can't use try to act all at all not even command mode So you actually have to open up a new tab in order to do that Then you can get into command mode and obviously You can't be focused on the address bar in order to do that So any customization that you want to do is done through commands and there are a ton of commands that you can do things from Changing key bindings adding bookmarks Changing two different urls to to bind two different keys you can bind urls to keys you can add You can open and close containers which we'll talk about here in a minute, which is really cool So there's just a ton of Commands listed here and if you've ever used Vim before you'll know that Vim is the same way There are a ton of Vim commands that you can use the difference is is that Vim the Vim documentation is fantastic and Very readable Whereas this is not I'll show you in just a minute Let's go ahead and go back to the modes those because there are other modes that we should talk about so we talked about hip mode So hip mode is when you hit F and it brings up the letters on every link And then you can press that letter to follow the link. That's what hip mode is actually using So if you can also press V and then you can select certain Paragraphs so if you if I wanted to select the S paragraph I just hit S and it would select that so I could go ahead and hit P Then and it would actually copy that to the clipboard And there are then certain things that you can actually do with the clipboard if you wanted to and all that stuff is Inside of the tutorial which I'll show you here again in just a minute. So that's hip mode and visual mode Visual mode isn't doesn't act like visual mode in Vim So when I pressed V as you can see it actually kind of acts like hint mode in that it allows you to Select certain blocks or certain words So in this case, like if I wanted to select just the troubleshooting guide I could do H H and it would actually select that word So visual mode isn't so much as like drag and drop like it is in Vim That's not really how visual mode in Vim works But if you started the top of a paragraph and then use the Vim keys to go down You can select certain lines right with tridactyl. It's more selecting blocks or specific words not all words But specific words, so that's how the visual mode actually works We've talked about command mode and then there's ignore mode ignore mode I've actually already shown you which is the blacklist mode so you can add URLs to blacklist But there are key bindings to add a URL temporarily to the ignore mode So if you're on a like let's say you're on a typing site like a typing tutor site And you don't want obviously wants your Vim stuff to work there You just want to be able to type into the typing tutor, right? You could hit control alt and escape and they'll temporarily add that site to the blacklist Until you move away from it now Here's one thing that I've noticed is that it does not work for me I'm not sure why that particular key binding doesn't work. I'm assuming it's because I have a conflicting key binding somewhere I haven't been able to find it, but for whatever reason I can't get that particular key binding to work So your mileage may vary on the ignore mode Personally, I just use the blacklist to add sites to the blacklist and then it's just there forever It's much better than actually having it there temporarily because chances are if you want it disabled for a website Once you probably want it disabled for the website all the time So those are the important modes that I wanted to talk about and I've talked about the blacklist So I don't need to talk about that again I'm just going through my list of things that I need to talk about The next two things that I want to talk about are searching and bookmarks So and I'm actually going to talk about searching in two different sections of this video So bear with me that I will just cover the functionality of searching right now Searching in Tridactyl is not like Vim from what I can tell now from the documentation It appears that you can actually change this but I'm unsure how as of yet So slash brings up search. So if I wanted to search for view I can do so now the thing here is that in Normal Vim mode what you'd be able to do then is hit end for next and it'll take you to the next instance of view In this particular document which happens to be this word right here But it doesn't actually do that it just goes away and I'm not sure why so if I do slash again and then view and then actually hit enter It will then do absolutely nothing. So you can't do n or capital N to go to the previous search term It just goes away and that's broken It's not the way search is supposed to work and what's what what I'm thinking is happening here Is that if you see this if you hit control if I hit control F Which actually doesn't actually work with try to act ill-enabled if you've ever used regular find in page Firefox search You'll see a UI that looks fairly similar to this The only difference is is that when you type in the word that you're searching for there are usually Arrow keys here, right and you can navigate between the instances of those Error, you know instances of your search by hitting those arrow keys or you can hit enter to go through all the search Results on the page neither of those are the case with try to act ill It's just there some there is looked but it looks like they're using a half-assed version of the built-in Firefox search And it just doesn't work. So search with try to act ill is broken It just does not work now It's possible as is usual that I'm doing something completely wrong. So just keep that in mind It's possible that I'm doing wrong and like I said somewhere in the documentation. I when I was browsing through it I do vaguely remember saying that you can change The search to not use the built-in Firefox search So maybe there's a way to change that I'd have to go back through and see but as is the default It doesn't work very well at all like it's just not good So searching broken in try to act ill which is a big deal because searching is a big thing that I do in a lot Of pages and it just unfortunately doesn't work all that well The next thing that I want to talk about is bookmarks and I'm just going to spend a second on this all the Firefox vim plug-in things have bookmarks built in they don't use And the thing here is that I'm not talking about like bookmarks as unique isn't you save the website That's not actually the way it works now I think you can set it up and in in some of the plugins to work that way, but with try to act ill Bookmarks are actually page marks So if I wanted to set a page mark for this particular Instance of this page where I'm scrolled and everything I could hit a hit the letter M And then it would allow me to come back to this page Right as it is so that is setting bookmarks and it does store them They also have local bookmarks which only exist when this particular browser session is open and they have global bookmark So the bookmarking thing is is worthwhile if you want to use it I don't use it so that's the reason why I'm not going to take you through the details of it So I just use the built-in bookmarking system of Firefox It's just where all my bookmarks have always been so adding a separate place for bookmarks doesn't really make sense for my workflow So now let's go ahead and talk about getting help and the documentation So by default the best place to get any help whatsoever is the try to act all tutorial and There are Like five or six pages here and it takes you through the basics, right? It takes you through the basics that you need to know it takes you if you never wanted You see any of the other pages the basics section here would actually get you through most of this stuff So it tells you how to do things in normal mode hit mode visual mode The command mode they ignore mode and stuff like that and then the subsequent pages I'll tell you more in-depth Things you can do inside of each of the modes So this page here is all for normal mode so you can you know use W to open up URLs and new windows Oh and open open up and curtain tab T to open a new tab and so on and so forth B brings up a list of all your current tabs, right? So it tells you all the stuff that you need to do so you just go through This tutorial and it brings you know like the next page here is for the hit mode So that's going to show you how to open link in background link in clipboard most all the hit modes if you remember is you press F and it allows you to open links without actually clicking on them so that's You can do very various things depending on where you want the link to open whether you want to open up in a new Tab you want to open up in a new window and things like that the next Pages for visual mode and it gives you some of the things that you can do in visual mode as well And the same thing for the next one, which is all about command mode now This page right here is probably the most important page out of the tutorial and unfortunately It's not anywhere near long enough or in depth enough for my taste because the the settings that Tried active offers are vast like the number of options that they offer are huge and They do not do a very good job of listing them out So all of the settings that you can change are way more than what you'll find on this page But they only show you these few and worse It doesn't show you a place where you can actually see those it should link you right to the settings or the preferences for the plugin, but it doesn't it really should and Because that's where you can actually find a list of all the settings that you can change But that is not linked to here The next one is for containers and we'll talk about containers now So if you use Firefox containers, which you definitely should the one of the coolest parts about tridactyl is that it actually allows you to create? Firefox containers right from the command look the command mode So you can create a new container by container create like so give it a name and you can give it a color and And then just to enter so what now that I've created that container You can actually see that I can open up a new container tab and my main is right there That's the container that I created and obviously you can just create the container But one of the coolest things is if you hit T Actually, you can't be focused on the address bar. You hit T and then you do dash C and then you give the name of the container you can then so this we're gonna call this main to just because I'm Not creative enough to come up with another name So just hit that and that actually is going to open up a new tab Inside of the main to container it looks like that container name was too close to the original main But you get the idea right you can Open new tabs and containers you can create containers you can delete containers all from the command the command mode Which is fantastic if you use Firefox containers. It's one of my favorite features of tridactyl. It's just really really good Okay, so the last thing to talk about here then before I jump into a couple negatives before we wrap up here I know this video is kind of running really long was way longer than I thought it was going to be but it's okay Anyways, the this is right here is the documentation and as you can see it is definitely not the most It's actually fairly organized because it is done alphabetically. So I can't say that it's not organized But everything is very very Technical right all of the properties and settings that you can set via command mode or all actually right here You can set all these things via the command mode And this is where you'd find a list of all the things you can set right settings for tab open and tab store and stuff like that And the you know the theme and whatever you can do all those stuff from the command mode But you can also do them right here from the preferences So this is kind of both the preferences and the documentation It's kind of all kind of mix together The reason why it's called mixed together is because you can make the changes to the preferences But all the preferences also have a little blurb about what they actually do None of them are all that in depth which is unfortunate But you can at least find some explanation of what each setting actually does here right in the preferences Which is about as good as the documentation actually gets and it's a Long set of documentation like it's screw you know You could sit here and scroll for a very long time before you even get out of the A's right We just got back to the B's and we're in the B's now in the C's right It just goes on for a very long time So it's a lot of preferences that you can do it Like I said every single one of those you can do inside of the command mode and they're not This is the only place where they seem to be all listed so that's my biggest gripe about this whole thing is that the Documentation is not very good. They do have a wiki on their GitHub page. It's not Comprehensive at all, but this is a fairly new plug-in. So I'm assuming that that will get better over time documentation always happens after a Project moves out of like the beta stage. So just hopefully that will get better over time so the last thing that I want to do in this video is talk about a couple things that I just find negative and I Don't even have to re- talk about the search. The search is just broken Another one is that it changes your new tab page and it doesn't ask you to do that It just does it right and it that drives me nuts like I use my own custom new tab page on my main machine This is a VM and I want it to stay my page I don't want you to change my new tab page because I don't need to see this every single time So you can obviously change it back But the fact that it changes it to begin with just no don't do that. That's not good. That's not user-friendly Don't do that have this page pop up the first time you installed the probe plug-in fine I don't care about that, but not every time I open up a new tab. That's just no I don't want you to do that and finally the thing that I wanted to say most about this was that and You can kind of get a sense of this throughout the entire video is that this plug-in is really good But it is in desperate need of a cheat sheet. It needs a cheat sheet So bad like if they had just like one page similar to like what you get with cute browser similar to get what you get like with Veeb both of those browsers are Very much keyboard-centric browsers and they both have cheat sheets that you can actually it shows a picture of the keyboard And then has a list of all the key bindings right there and it's you know fantastic, right? This needs that desperate desperately needs that because it has a ton of options as I showed you and a ton of key bindings that I didn't get to show you and Finding them is kind of a pain in the rear end now There is a command called colon bind that you can access and then you can press a key on The keyboard and it'll tell you what that key is bound to but you have to go search that out Right, you have to know what key you want to search for you know It just doesn't list all of them, right? So it needs a cheat sheet desperately it like really really bad and they need to fix search Other than that, I really like Tridactyl a lot As evidenced by the fact that I actually talked about it for at least 30 minutes I'm probably gonna be able to cut some of that stuff out But still I talked about it for a very long time so much so that the heat is bothering me again Yeah, I got you have to turn off the air conditioner in the you know The fan or whatever to record a video and it shows anyways So that is Tridactyl if you have thoughts on this you can leave those in the comment section below I think I'm going to continue to use it as my main extension even though I still do think the other VIM plugins are more Polished in terms of actually, you know being complete and stuff like search actually works in them, right? It doesn't work here and I'm gonna use this. I'm gonna maybe contribute to the Project a little bit with documentation and stuff and see if I can't help them out that way I'm not a developer. So that's about the only way I could help them So we'll see how that goes, but you know, it's a it's a very good plug-in and I'm you know happy to use it So whoever actually mentioned this to me. I'm sorry. I don't remember who that was. Thank you for pointing it out to me I appreciate it because it's really cool. So that is Tridactyl comments in the comments below you can follow me on master on odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast links for libera pay and YouTube We will be in the video description as well. Thanks everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube You guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channel's are so not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are all absolutely awesome. I truly do I hope you know I it sounds memorized, but again can't say how much I appreciate you guys and your support So just thank you. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time Also blabbered on there for a little bit a little bit at the end because whatever