Add A Custom Search Engine for Vimium

Table of Contents

Vimium is a Chrome extension that lets us to browse the internet with our fingers, rather than using the mouse. In this post, I will going to share how to add a custom search engine for Vimium.

There are some background knowledge we need to be clear.

Vomnibar
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If you have installed Vimium, in a normal web page, you can press o, a long bar will appear and wait for your input. Here we can type keywords to search through history and bookmarks, or just search through the default Google search engine. This long text bar is called Vomnibar by Vimium.

Add custom search engine
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For example, suppose that we want to add google translate as our custom search engine. First, open the Vimium options, in the lower part, there is “Custom search engine” part. In the text box, add the following new line:

gt: https://translate.google.com/?sl=de&tl=en&text=%s&op=translate Gtranslate

In this example, the alias for Google translate is gt. In the URL part, we need to replace the actual search query with %s (the query text will be URL-encoded, to avoid URL-encode, use %S instead). Gtranslate is custom name for this new search engine, and can be empty.

Then click Save changes in the bottom right. The new search engine should be added with success.

Use the new search Engine
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Open a normal webpage, press o¹, we should see the Vomnibar. Then press gt + <Space>, we are now prompted to enter the query text. After entering the text, use return key to search.