How to toggle Full Screen (f) with Vimium enabled

[vgalovic]

Hi, I am new to this extension, so I don't know how I could to set a new map for full screen, for example in youtube. In browser, with out Vimium it would be f, but now with Vimium enabled it is no longer the case. My question is, how to map full screen mode for videos to something else, for example <C-f>?

[philg-dev]

You can either bind the vimium command passNextKey to a key of your choice. e.g. map q passNextKey. When you press that key the very next keystroke will be passed to the underlying page and afterwards Vimium will resume handling inputs again.

Or you could go into insert mode (default: i) in order to pass all keys pressed to the underlying page. It might act slightly weirdly that way. On Firefox I think full screen will be layered above the Vimium HUD indicator for "Insert mode" and when you press ESC, I think it will leave full screen but still remain in "Insert mode". That's just a minor quirk and should be easy to get used to.

Another way to get the default full screen mapping that many sites like YouTube, Twitch, etc. have implemented work with Vimium would be to either fully unmap f in your Vimium Options by adding a line with unmap f to your mappings config or you can add 'f' to excluded keys for specific websites. By default f opens the link hints mode which lets you navigate pages with your keyboard - so it's generally pretty useful and I don't like to have this functionality excluded or unmapped, therefore I usually just go with the "Insert mode" method instead.

Edit: Just to clarify - with Vimium you can't just arbitrarily "remap" page functionality like video player full screen mode. You can either use the keybindings that the underlying page provides by bypassing Vimium's key handling as described above or you could use the Vimium link hints with f and type the key combination that will show up on the full screen UI button.

[DePoli97]

Hi,
I’d like to suggest a small but potentially powerful feature: the ability to remap a Vimium key to another page key, i.e. a key event that is passed through to the underlying webpage unchanged.

Why this matters
Currently, Vimium intercepts keys before the page sees them. You can either:

• map a key to a Vimium command (e.g. f → LinkHints), or
• unmap it so the page can use it (e.g. f for fullscreen on YouTube).

But there’s no way to do something like:

map f LinkHints.activate
map g sendKey f   # forward “f” to the page

This would be incredibly useful for cases where:

• You want to keep f for Vimium LinkHints (it’s the most natural position, similar to how many Vim users work),
• but still access site-specific f behavior (like fullscreen on YouTube), by pressing another key (g in this example).

Proposed syntax
Something simple like:

map g sendKey f

or

map g passThrough(f)

which would cause Vimium to synthesize and dispatch a key event for f to the active page.

• It gives users full flexibility while keeping Vimium’s interception model intact.
• Many advanced users have this exact need (e.g. fullscreen, site-specific shortcuts, web apps).

[philg-dev]

@DePoli97 I'm not entirely sure what the difference would be to my reply to this discussion from months ago.

Since you can't have page specific key mappings anyway, it would pretty much be the most consistent way to just define a key of your choice as the passNextKey command that Vimium already has and call it a day.

[DePoli97]

@philg-dev
The issue with passNextKey is that it’s not deterministic.
Once pressed, it lets through an undefined number of subsequent keys; which makes it unusable.
The closest alternative, enterPassMode, requires hitting Esc afterwards, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a short one-off key.
“passNextKey” is a bit of a misnomer; it’s more like “passSomeKeysUntilItFeelsLikeStopping”.

[philg-dev]

Well,... if that's really the case, then that would mean it's a bug and a bug report and a hopefully subsequent fix of passNextKey would be the proper / easiest way to go. Reinventing the wheel instead of using functionality that is intended to work perfectly fine for your use case already would only cause more confusing, bloated and hard to maintain code.

So if you can describe a reproducible scenario where passNextKey doesn't work properly for you, then I would encourage you to write a bug report. If there's reproduction steps, I might be inclined to look into fixing it myself for you even - if I have time.

Since I personally don't use that functionality, I can't really speak much from my own experience.

Also: this comment is not meant to "turn down" your suggestion entirely. I'm just looking for a solution that has the least impact on the code base and still covers the most important aspect of your requirements.

Another thing that confuses some people here, so I'd like to explicitly point it out: I'm not the owner / author or maintainer of Vimium, my username just unfortunately happens to be very similar to philc.

So I'm just a small time contributor and my opinion doesn't necessarily matter. Given the Vimium Design Principles I'm trying to align my statements with the simplicity aspects that we should try to live up to.

[philg-dev]

Actually there's a related issue already. So one of the cases where the passNextKey command seems to be buggy is exactly in those full screen scenarios.

See also #3922

It might be worth posting your experience there as a comment.