Sadly it's not realistic. Even if someone were to put in the time to make it work, Vimperator would just break again within the next year when XUL addons are deprecated in favor of WebExtensions, and unfortunately WebExtensions do not support all the features of Vimperator. You can use VimFx for now, but again it is a XUL addon and would take a massive amount of work to port to a WebExtension. Hopefully someone can get Vimium or cVim ported over as a WebExtension. I have played around some with this but haven't got it to work. It seems some of the needed API's are missing from WebExtensions at the moment.
Pentadactyl is also going to break then, for the same reason. That's why I've been moving from Firefox to Pale Moon, where Pentadactyl continues to work. I expect Vimperator will continue to work on Pale Moon too.
You know what they say, pull requests are the new feature requests...
But yeah, I'd love to see vimperator or pentadactyl supporting this, and no, I neither have the time nor the skillset to fix it myself.
Try Vimfx, I switched to take advantage of e10s, and it's been worthwhile.
Re:Update on Multi-Process Firefox
by Ar-Curunir on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @10:06PM
(#13234441)
VimFX has been a more than capable substitute.
Re:Update on Multi-Process Firefox
by proaralyst on Thursday December 22, 2016 @07:52AM
(#13236917)
I just took a gander: no tab-search, the keybindings are closer to Vimium than plain vim and no external editor. Also the hinting is _slow_ - it takes a second to render the link hints on the hacker news home page.
How are you dealing with all of that?
Re:Update on Multi-Process Firefox
by Ar-Curunir on Thursday December 22, 2016 @10:57AM
(#13238088)
To be honest the only thing I miss is tab search; you can modify the keybindings as you wish. I don't use hints as much as I used to.
Maybe my browsing style has changed; more reading and less clicking.
I have been testing out VimFx as well (long time Pentadactyl user). I miss being able to do ":b" and quickly find open tabs, but the Firefox awesomebar has a similar functionality if you type "%". That's what I have been using. You can see more information here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
At this point I think it's either fix it yourself or look elsewhere :(. I don't think the current maintainers have the bandwidth to port it to WebExtensions.
Check out VimFX. It is a very capable substitute.
How does it compare to Pentadactyl? I heavily use pendacatyl scripting functionality to do shelling out from firefox.
It lacks many features of Pentadactyl but covers the basics -- clicking links and text boxes with the keyboard. I have found it possible to replicate some of the things I missed from Pentadactyl through built-in features of Firefox I didn't know about (like the awesomebar filters I linked to above). Also, from using VimFx and accidentally hitting ":", i discovered the GCLI. It is a little clunky, but it is possible to define custom commands for the GCLI that have similar access to Firefox as XUL addons (and I think the GCLI is supposed to survive through WebExtensions).
Two year old github issue but yet any development to be seen or reported :/