Do you know those moments in life when you discover some piece of software you didn’t know before and immediately fall in love with it, not knowing how you could survive without it for so long?
Well that just happened to me with Vimperator. Vimperator is a Firefox addon that (by default) takes away your menubar and other things of the standard Firefox interface and adds vim behaviour to your browser.

If you do not like vi/vim/gvim for whatever reason, skip this posting.

Once you installed the addon and restarted your browser you can go to the Vimperator introductional page by pressing F1. You will notice there is a tutorial in the Help topics section. If you are already familiar with basic vim usage you should be able to go over that tutorial in about 15 minutes. After you mastered the basics you will be able to efficiently surf the web with your Firefox browser without issueing the mouse (too often). (I have not encountered a situation where I really needed the mouse yet, but I imagine some flash applications will be hard to master without. I have no flash at hand at the moment, though. Note: You are still able to use your mouse even when Vimperator is active.)

If you tried some console based browsers in the past you may have gotten annoyed when trying to click some link at some spot within a page. Hitting TAB until you reach that specific link is no fun. Therefore Vimperator introduces a system called Hints. By pressing either the f or F key (open in this tab / open in new tab) you will notice that Vimperator adds a small red box with a number in it for each link on the page. You can now simply enter the number of the link you wish to open. Now that’s a much better concept than hitting TAB repeatedly.
Have you ever got annoyed by some textfield that was way too small for the text you were typing in it? Sure, you could just fire up your favorite editor and copy and paste your text after you are done. Vimperator has a nice shortcut for that. Once your focus is on some textfield, press CTRL+i. Vimperator then fires up gvim (make sure it is installed) and you can type your text in that editor window. After saving and closing the document, the text is automatically put into the texfield (this posting is written that way).

If you have any questions the excellent (so far) documentation fails to answer, /join #vimperator on irc.freenode.net.

So, if you like vim and want to make your browser more accessible for you without a mouse (or less accessible for anybody else who even has a mouse but does not know vim) you should definitely take a look at this very cool plugin.

Keep in mind that I’ve only used it for about two hours at the time of writing. If you know any other tricks, drop a comment.