Vimari Fork

[nbelzer]

This is mostly targeted at the maintainers of Vimari (which I believe to be @danielcompton and @simeg)

I've been using Vimari for quite some time now but it's been missing some features that I and others would like to see. These include:

• Customisation (Add more key bindings + ability to assign own key bindings #171, Where is the configuration file or how to configure vimari? #166, Open new tab but doesnt make it active. #155, Excluded URLs #153, Add custom keybinding settings #142, Support numeric prefixes #98)
• Better mode isolation (insert vs normal) (Support for insert mode #170, Scrolling with j after pressing d jumps the scroll position to where it was before pressing d #168, Disable Youtube shortcut key for "f" #148, Hitting escape exits full screen #110, Is it possible to exclude certain keys just for certain sites? #102)
• Smooth Scrolling (Reload page without cache with R #157, Scrolling with j and k keys is not smooth. #83)
• A help page (Help page with ? #158)

Some of these features have been available in PR's to the project for some time now which I have combined in my own version of Vimari on my own fork.

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My fork currently includes:

• update mousetrap library
• configuration support (mostly by the work of @nieldm),
• smooth scrolling
• isolated normal mode such that issues like Scrolling with j after pressing d jumps the scroll position to where it was before pressing d #168 don't happen

Before being able to merge these changes back in to the main repo I would like to:

• implement an indicator showing when you are in insert mode.
• introduce some sort of overlay with a help page (although this could be done separately)
• cleanup of legacy code related to how the extension worked before Safari 12. There seems to be some unused code that should probably be removed.
• making sure the extension works properly on macOS Big Sur.

---

I'm wondering if there is an interest in bringing some of this functionality back to this main repo and send it out to all those using Vimari from the App Store. As I'm already putting in some of my free time on my own fork, I'd be willing to put in some extra time to bring these features back to the main repo. However since the repo has been pretty silent for some time now I'd like to discuss this before putting in the work.

I hope this is the right place to discuss this, please let me know if there is an interest in this and how we could go about it.

[simeg]

Hello.

I'm not maintaining this repo any more, but it sounds great to me!

My recommendation would be to not aim for a big bang integration but make multiple small and descriptive PRs. Your code may make sense to you but for maintainers it can be hard to understand code changes if they're grouped and lacking good commit messages. This is probably not news to anyone but I feel like it's worth repeating 🙂

[danielcompton]

Hi @nbelzer, thanks for doing all this work. As you can probably tell, I haven't had a ton of time for Vimari over the last six months due to COVID + other personal stuff. If you'd like, I'm happy to invite you as a maintainer to the repo.

Longer term, I've been excited to see that Safari is going to support WebExtensions. In theory this would let us unify the codebase with Vimium. I see you're already involved in the discussion at philc/vimium#3610.

[nbelzer]

Thank you for your reply @danielcompton, hope you are doing okay!

I would be happy to help out as a maintainer. Now that I have some extra time on my hands for (at least) the next 2 months I think I could be of value to introduce the features mentioned above into Vimari. I should mention that I am quite new to the open source scene, so a watchful eye would be good to have.

[srikat]

@nbelzer Thanks for the updated extension.

I have installed Vimari from App Store, replaced the app in Applications from your fork and enabled it in Safari preferences.

However there is no button to open the config file, userSettings.json.

Any hint about the location of this file?

[nbelzer]

Hey @srikat, thanks for trying it out. To get those features you have to compile and install the app from my fork on the branch feature/access_configuration. If all is successful you can open the Vimari panel (by clicking on the extension icon in Safari) and press 'Open Configuration file'. But know that this is very much an experimental branch that was initially only for my personal use. As mentioned above in this issue I'll be working on getting those features (like configuration) into the main repo here.

[srikat]

Thanks. I will wait for it to be in the binary.

[DarkAlexWang]

@nbelzer Thanks for your great work, just wondering when do you expect to merge your new features to the master repo? I can't wait to try it out. ^.^

[nbelzer]

@DarkAlexWang thats nice to hear, I hope soon. The work is already available in pr #175 and #176 as you might have seen. However I prefer that Daniel Compton takes a look at it before merging.

[DarkAlexWang]

@nbelzer Got it, will wait for the merge. Thanks, man.

[nbelzer]

Except for the help page the features from my fork have all been implemented in the master branch. They are already available through the latest beta release for those interested.