Frequently Asked Questions

Below is a list of some of the commonest questions that come to our attention, along with their hopefully satisfactory answers. Please take a minute to search for your answers here before asking the mailing list or irc channel, and don't forget to peruse the NEWS file for recent changes that might throw you off balance.

General

Why did Pentadactyl split from Vimperator?

The reasons for the fork were mostly political, but mostly boil down to the fact that the current maintainer, while making no substantial contributions to the project for several years, continues to exercise full editorial control while actively soliciting donations with no transparency whatever. We considered the latter especially a slight on both our developers and our users, and after a considerable escalation of the degree of offense felt compelled to leave the project.

However, though we could no longer justify supporting the Vimperator project, we've invested considerable time and energy into the code over these past several years and still use and care about it. For that reason, we've decided to publicly release our personal changes and continue to develop the extension under a different name.

What differentiates Pentadactyl from Vimperator?

The main difference is that Vimperator's most active developers have moved on to Pentadactyl. More qualitative changes may be found in the change log, but essentially add up to what we consider more active and thoughtful development. Among the most visible differences, as of Pentadactyl 1.0, are more extensive Firefox 4 support, significantly better startup time and completion performance, considerably better :sanitize and private mode support, a greatly improved incremental find implementation, major improvements in Ex command parsing (including the ability to separate commands with | and split long commands across lines), conditionals (:if/:else) in configuration files, greatly updated documentation, and a number of bug fixes.

What do the "[-+♥]" symbols in the status bar mean?

These indicate that you can move backward through history, that you can move forward through history, and that the page is bookmarked, respectively. See also :help status-line.

How can I prevent d on the last tab from closing the window?

:set! browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab=false

How can I use regular expressions in the page search?

Regular expression search is possible with the /Find Bar/ extension installed, in which case it can be toggled with the \r and \R search flags. See also :help pattern.

How can I prevent the command line completion list showing until I press ?

You can disable it entirely with :set autocomplete= or for specific types of command completion by choosing more restrictive values. See :help autocomplete and wildmode.

Why doesn't external input field editing work with my editor setting?

Unfortunately, external editors which return immediately, before editing is complete, are not supported. This means that gvim, for instance, must be run with the -f flag, and editors run from a terminal must not connect to a remote process. In the case of Rxvt-unicode, this means that the urxvtc program is not an option, and Gnome Terminal is very likely not useable under any circumstances.

If you are using a version of Firefox newer than 4.0 beta 7 and a version of Pentadactyl less than 1.0 βeta 4, you'll need to upgrade the latter.

Why can't I build/install from the Mercurial repository on Windows®?

We use symbolic links in our repository to deal with certain files which are common across projects. Mercurial for Windows®, unfortunately, doesn't deal with these very well. However, adding the following lines to the .hg\hgrc file in your repository should make things work:

[hooks]
update = python:common/contrib/fix_symlinks.py:fix_symlinks
preupdate = python:common/contrib/fix_symlinks.py:fix_symlinks
commit = python:common/contrib/fix_symlinks.py:fix_symlinks
precommit = python:common/contrib/fix_symlinks.py:fix_symlinks

:open behavior

Why can't I separate URLs in :open with a comma anymore?

See :help urlseparator

:open search-string or :open google search-string results in The url is not valid and cannot be loaded

You need a valid search engine name in the defsearch option. If it's stopped working suddenly, there's a good chance that you've either deleted a search engine or changed its alias. You can check by invoking :dialog searchengines There also appears to be a Firefox bug whereby the default engines are hidden after an update. This can be remedied by invoking :js services.get(browserSearch).getEngines().forEach(function (e) e.hidden = false)

Key bindings

How can I use the native key bindings of sites like Gmail?

See the passkeys option to automatically pass specific keys on sites of your choosing, or autocmd-examples to automatically enter PASS THROUGH mode for certain websites.

Why doesn't my modes.passAllKeys autocmd work anymore?

See faq-website-keys above.

Hints

How can I use keys other than numbers for hinting?

Use the hintkeys option.

How can I display my hints in upper case but type them in lower case?

If you use alphabetic characters for your hintkeys and would like to be able to type them in lower case but still have the hints displayed in upper case, use:

:highlight -a Hint text-transform: uppercase;

How can I hide the hint text for input and image hints?

If you'd only like to show the numbered portion of hints, you can do so with:

:highlight Hint::after content: attr(number) !important;