// the find
jinzhu/vrome
Vrome: Bringing Vim elegance to Chrome
Vrome is a Vim keybindings extension for Chrome, written in CoffeeScript, that maps most of Vim's modal editing and command-line interface onto browser navigation. It targets Vim/Vimperator users who want keyboard-driven browsing. The project has been dead since 2016.
The feature set is genuinely wide — hint-mode link following, tab management, marks, bookmarks, history search, external editor support, and a command line all made it into the codebase. The module split between background and frontend scripts is clean for a browser extension of this era. Chinese pinyin support in the frontend modules is a nice touch that most Western-focused alternatives skipped. The vromerc config file approach (dotfile-style user config) was ahead of its time for browser extensions.
Abandoned in 2016 — Manifest V2 only, and Chrome's MV2 deprecation has either already killed this or will soon. CoffeeScript as the source language means the build chain is a Ruby/Node hybrid involving Bundler, Guard, and npm, which is a maintenance nightmare even if someone wanted to revive it. There is no test suite anywhere in the tree. The external editor integration requires a local server process (Ruby or Python, pick your poison) running on the machine, which is a significant setup burden the README buries.