Firefox preferences in dotfiles with Vimperator

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Note: this post is now out of date.

I’m a big fan of syncing my preferences with my dotfiles Git repository. It lets me sync my .vimrc, my .bashrc, and more. Vimperator is a Firefox extension that puts Vim-style keybindings into the browser (much like Chrome’s Vimium), but it has another great feature: the .vimperatorrc file.

If you’re a hardcore Firefox user, you’ve likely seen about:config. If you type that into your Firefox address bar, you’ll see a ton of options and flags. Some of its settings are in Firefox’s user-facing settings, like browser.startup.homepage. Other options are hidden from the menus, like browser.tabs.closeButtons to control where the tab close buttons appear. You can even use it to configure your extensions!

Vimperator’s .vimperatorrc lets you configure these settings. For example, to set your browser’s homepage, add this to ~/.vimperatorrc:

set! browser.startup.homepage=https://duckduckgo.com/

You can check out my Vimperator config if you’re looking for a huge slew of options; I’ve found a lot of really helpful tweaks to make Firefox my own.