readability VS VimFx

In this video, I roast a port of a Mozilla Javascript library, readability.js (https://github.com/mozilla/readability) to Go (https://github.com/cixtor/readability).

I ported Mozilla’s Readability library to Go a couple of years ago [1] and use it every day to power a custom RSS feed of Hacker News via Reeder [2]. This is not a novelty, many people have ported Readability to different programming languages over the years.

[1] https://github.com/cixtor/readability

[2] https://github.com/cixtor/rssfeed

I used to be a loving VimFX [0] user. It had intelligent link hints (essentially, links it thinks you are likely to want, e.g. because they're big, get single-key shortcuts). The scrolling was actually native, as in equivalent to hitting the arrow keys. I don't think any of the other Vim emulator plugins ever replicated that. Vimium doesn't, Tridactyl doesn't, and Vim Vixen was horribly broken.

Apparently VimFX still runs via some hacks on modern Firefox versions? The last release was even in 2022. Maybe I should give it a try again.

[0] https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx

Yeah, agree, very frustrating. I didn’t want to leave Firefox, so started looking for an alternative. I stumbled upon https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx. It solves the issue.

> But instead we get “Colorways”

Yeah, the browser situation sucks and it's getting worse by the day.

> I remember being upset for months when they killed XUL.

You know what, still a week does not pass without me mourning the death XUL...

I'm currently use Waterfox quite a bit. VimFX is still somewhat maintained[1] and works with Waterfox Current!

It should be added that this browser is owned by an adtech company called System1. But my only alternative at this point is surfing in a straitjacket (without VimFX) or use Waterfox. Haven't really found any apparent wrongdoings by System1 yet, but I guess it's a question of time...

[1] https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx

I recently installed Tridactyl¹ as a Firefox extension². It has a ton of features but I only wanted to replace the functionality of two non-WebExtension add-ons:

* VimFx³ provided handy keyboard short-cuts for working within the browser

* ItsAllText⁴ which allowed me to use GVim to edit and save the contents of a text box

While going through its builtin tutorial, I found that it also supports keyboard-based selection of text. While it’s still documented as not yet being stable, I’ve found that it works well. I’ve yet to incorporate the rest of Tridactyl’s extra functionality into my workflow but what they’ve achieved with the WebExtensions API is very impressive. Also, and importantly, the built-in tutorial and documentation are excellent.

While working from home, I’m currently using Windows 10 so I’ve ran into one issue⁵, “Encoding of non-Latin-1 characters entered in external editor gets messed up with Unicode-based external editors on Windows” (and it looks like that should be fixed soon).

1. https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl

2. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...

3. https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx

4. https://github.com/docwhat/itsalltext/

5. https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/issues/876