Is there a way to disable Vimium on my page as a site owner?

[vincentwoo]

Pardon me if this is answered somewhere, but I couldn't find it in the FAQ or README.

I run a website that many programmers use. Some of the use Vimium, and it appears the extension tries to upgrade editing on certain elements on my page. This has been causing some tricky JS errors that are very hard to track down as well as a lot of user pain because they don't realize the failures are due to the conflict between our code and Vimium's.

Is there a way to tag elements with "if you are running Vimium, please do not enhance this element"? Thanks for your reply in advance.

[smblott-github]

@vincentwoo... Not currently. Such a feature would require some careful thought.

[vincentwoo]

Are you open to considering this feature? If so, can you say what some of your major concerns are? I obviously don't want to step on any toes, but I do want to offer a better user experience for my users who have Vimium installed (which is a surprising chunk of people).

[leeny]

+1 This would be a really useful addition.

[gdh1995]

You may dispatch a fake unload message on DOM ready / window load - if only Vimium has inited.

Here's my example: https://jsfiddle.net/2L36ypys/, and you'll see you can not use f to activate hints.

This works since commit adce73c (2016/04/05).

BTW, could you provide more clues and we may solve such conflicts.

[vincentwoo]

I'm not a vimium user myself, so I'll install it tomorrow and try to have a more concrete bug report for you. Thanks for the snippet.

[gdh1995]

In fact, according to tests in https://jsfiddle.net/2L36ypys/1/, we can dispatch such a message from the "host" environment when the page is "loading", because Vimium installs its unload event listener before all other page scripts.

But my Vimium++ does not use this listener and there's no easy method to destroy it by page scripts.

So I'm expecting your searches. A test page where you can reproduce errors is just OKay. Thanks a lot.

[pimlottc]

Related to this, there is a 2-year old project to detect whether the user is using Vimium, might be useful here: https://github.com/EvanHahn/Detect-Vimium

[gdh1995]

@pimlottc The extension has not worked for 1 or 2 years, because Vimium uses 'shadowDOM' to hide its nodes.

[vincentwoo]

I could not exactly reproduce the problem that vimium users have on my site (probably because I don't use Vim personally). Is it still on the table to add some kind of vimium-specific CSS class to elements to ask the extension not to augment it?

[smblott-github]

Is it still on the table to add some kind of vimium-specific CSS class to elements to ask the extension not to augment it?

I'm not sure this is a great idea.

For sure it would cause user confusion if Vimium just didn't work at all on some sites, and users can already disable Vimium on your site themselves, see here.

Also, if we pursued your idea then we'd probably also need a mechanism for users to re-enable Vimium.

[vincentwoo]

Alright. Is there a way for us to at least know if Vimium has been enabled? The issue is users blame us when a thing breaks due to a strange interaction. My service already uses a very complicated editing surface (CodeMirror), so I'd like to be able to do something.

[rtlong]

If Vimium could at least add an artifact on the DOM in some way, at least sites like @vincentwoo's referring to could be made aware the user has Vimium installed and they could show a message to the user reminding them there might be conflicting behaviors when combining a complex UI in the webpage with all the Vimium offers, or even offer help in configuring either the app in question or Vimium to resolve them.

[smblott-github]

If Vimium could at least add an artifact on the DOM in some way...

We pre-load the Vomnibar on every (top-level) page. We could assign it a suitable class or id, I guess.

[vincentwoo]

That would certainly help!

[gdh1995]

@smblott-github My idea is that Vimium renames its shadow host node from <div> to another name, like <vimium-ui>, and then it is just enough to search <html>'s children for this tag name. I think this custom-element tag name won't happen to be the same as other websites'.