Qutebrowser is an epic “keyboard-driven, vim-like browser based on PyQt5”.

It has extremely flexible support for quick/easy key bindings. Aside from the defaults that ship with it, you can assign pretty much any key combination to any combination of commands or scripts. Anyway, here are some interesting custom keybindings I have in my keys.conf that may or may not be interesting/inspiring.

Switching useragent

set network user-agent ""
    ,ud

set network user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_1) AppleWebKit/601.2.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.1 Safari/601.2.7'
    ,us

Useful for if you want to quickly switch the useragent. I don’t use it very often anymore now that Qutebrowser uses WebEngine as the backend, but was very useful in situations like:

Viewing videos in a video player

This is pretty much standard now, and there are published userscripts that do this with extra fanciness. This version is probably the quickest/simplest method.

spawn nohup mpv {url}
    x

hint links spawn nohup mpv {hint-url}
    ;x

x to open the current Youtube or other video page in mpv, or ;x to start open a link via hints in mpv. nohup is used to it keeps playing even if you close the browser.

Zotero bookmarklet

jseval javascript:var d=document,s=d.createElement('script');s.src='https://www.zotero.org/bookmarklet/loader.js';(d.body?d.body:d.documentElement).appendChild(s);void(0);
    ,z

Now when you type ,z in normal mode, it runs the Zotero bookmarklet script to save the current page to your Zotero account.

This same technique can be used for any js bookmarklets. (Note that currently bookmarklets can’t be bookmarked like other links - relevant issue.)

Internet Archive

Ever follow a link to a url only to receive a 404 error? With the following keybindings, you can simply type wa to open the url on the Internet Archive. (or ;wa for a hint-links version)

open https://web.archive.org/web/{url}
    wa

hint links fill :open -t https://web.archive.org/web/{hint-url}
    ;wa

Final notes

This is only scraping the surface of what is possible! There are many many other things you could do with simple keybindings, and this doesn’t even cover userscripts where you can script the browser in any programming language!

If you have any interesting ideas of your own, please comment here or ping me on Twitter!