Vivaldi 5.6 Integrates Mastodon and Adds You.com for Selected Markets

#1

Vivaldi recently became the first browser to have its own Mastodon instance, Vivaldi Social. Now, the new version on the desktop is the first to integrate Mastodon into the browser itself

At present, the You.com search-engine option is only available for Vivaldi users in countries including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

I had not heard of you.com before. I’m not sure who is behind it.

Also, I’m not sure if Vivaldi built a Mastodon client, like Vivaldi Mail, or if they are adding a default web panel, like Wikipedia.

The Manjaro package has not updated to 5.6 yet. So I haven’t tried these features.

Screen capture of the package version in GitLab.

#2

FYI, if you happen to use Vivaldi on Manjaro, the maintainer recently changed the installation script so that it no longer installs or updates the proprietary media codecs that Vivaldi uses. Looking at the change in the package gives a clue on how to run the update yourself. Namely, you can run the script that is bundled with Vivaldi. I’ve written it up in my Gemlog.

#3

The mastodon panel seems to be just a web panel. It defaults to Vivaldi.social but you can sign in to any Masto host. It’s nicely done.

I’d never heard of You.com either. There is a mode where You .com is allegedly totally private but you have to opt-in for that to take effect. By default it’s a bit less private than DDG.

Seirdy is currently reevaluating it. Since it looks like a Bing clone but claims to have it’s own crawler and index.

(Aside: I do hate it when search services play coy about having their own crawler (and what type) and index.)

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#4

/aside
Queries like “My IP Address is” “ipv4” helps find out the obvious metas

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#5

Totally unrelated, but thank you for that gem on opening a terminal inside of Vim, @mike. As someone who uses Vim daily for writing everything, that was a very cool thing to learn. I’d been using ! for the longest time.

I hope no one else knows the pain of using ! wl-copy on a Vim selection, then having to undo the deletion afterward… and now I can just grep and pipe it to wl-copy.

On-topic, I had heard of you.com before but immediately dismissed it when I heard they didn’t have their own index. Kagi is definitely the best meta search engine—no contest.

#6

I’m glad you liked the gemlog.

There are some other Vim commands that might interest you.

I’m not sure about Wayland, but the support for X.org clipboards within Vim is good.

In Vim, clipboards are known as registers. In X11, clipboards are called selections. And, Vim’s naming convention for registers is double quote " and then the register. For example, "0 or "a

Vim supports both the X11 CLIPBOARD selection with "+ and the PRIMARY selection (Linux middle mouse click) with "*

You can yank directly to those with "+y or :[range] yank + This is what I would recommend instead of wl-copy.

I use the following keyboard shortcuts to access the clipboard. You can place these in your vimrc. Just make sure that your Vim shortcuts don’t conflict with any terminal shortcuts. Note that pasting while in Insert mode will respect the 'textwidth' (hard wrap) and 'autoindent' options if set.

xmap <F3> "+y  " Copy visual selection. 
nmap <F3> <Cmd>%yank+<CR>  " Copy the whole document while in Normal mode. 

nmap <F4> "+gP  " Paste to the left of the cursor in Normal mode. 
imap <F4> <C-R>+  " Type the contents of the clipboard while in Insert mode. 
xmap <F4> "+gP  " Replace the visual selection with the clipboard contents.

! wl-copy is a filter in Vim. That is why the visual selection was deleted. If you just want to send a range to an external program then you can use :write_c For example, :'<,'> write !wl-copy

As a further aside, I use Lagrange to browse Geminispace. And Lagrange offers two subscription mechanisms. If you browse to my /gemlog/ and right click on a blank area of the page, you can choose either Subscribe to Page … which populates the :star: sidebar, or Bookmark Page … which has a further ‘Use as bookmark source’ toggle in its pop-up menu. This second option creates a kind of table of contents for my gemlogs in the :open_book: sidebar. And Lagrange keeps this list in sync with my Gemini capsule. I use this feature as a quick way to refer to my notes. And these live bookmarks are a great feature of Gemini/Lagrange.

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#7

You can yank directly to those with "+y or :[range] yank + This is what I would recommend instead of wl-copy.

I was using this until I switched to Sway, but this doesn’t work on (at least) this Wayland compositor. Couldn’t figure out why (the register can still be interacted with in Vim; it just doesn’t correspond to Wayland’s “System” register), but found that wl-copy was one thing that worked so I’ve been using it ever since. This is probably the number one thing that annoys me about using a Wayland compositor.

Those shortcuts are handy for other scenarios, though, thank you.

! wl-copy is a filter in Vim. That is why the visual selection was deleted. If you just want to send a range to an external program then you can use :write_c For example, :'<,'> write !wl-copy

I knew there must be a proper way to do what I wanted to do, thank you!

Lagrange/Gemini and subscriptions

You introduced me to Lagrange quite a while ago, and while I definitely think it’s a great browser, I use amfora now just for simplicity (and because it’s in Arch’s official repos). Unfortunately, I haven’t found much to interest me in geminispace. Drew DeVault stopped posting to it (and in general, recently), who produced some of the only content I was interested in. So I am essentially never in the browser unless I get a direct .gmi link, which rather defeats the purpose of the subscription list.

I find it much easier to manage subscriptions via RSS (I use newsboat), and since you write about stuff I’m interested in, I’ve added your Atom feed to my RSS reader :slight_smile:

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#8

I can’t read vimscript too well. But this Vim plugin looks reasonable.

#9

This works great, thank you! I try to keep Vim minimal (like using netrw instead of nerdtree) so that the only thing I need to port over is my 30-line~/.vimrc (and because I’m often using Vim on remote systems), but this plugin is a must for Wayland systems. And it’s quite small, anyhow.

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#10

There was something else I thought of.

Vim lives in the terminal. And Vim packages in Linux distributions usually enable mouse support. This means when you select text, that is a visual selection in Vim.

But strictly speaking you’re still looking at a terminal.

I’m not sure about Wayland. But my XFCE Terminal app uses the common shortcut of Shift+Mouse Click to return mouse control to the Terminal. On X11, this means I can pull an X11 primary selection by: holding shift, selecting text in Vim with the mouse, and then middle-mouse clicking in a different application to paste the primary selection.

If this works on Wayland, this might be a quick way to copy short passages while Vim is running.

#11

I do this as well, though I tend to use CTRL+SHIFT+C. The only issue is, as you alluded to, if you have set number enabled as I do, you pull in the line numbers as well with longer passages. The middle-click paste works as well (I use Alacritty). It’s sort of a weird thing to do on a laptop because I have to 3-finger click to get a middle-click, but it’s cool to know.

#12

With regard to the original news item, Vivaldi on Android is adding support for hardware keys. This lets you do two-factor authentication with a much safer hardware key.

Safer logins with Hardware Key Authentications

We don’t only want your browsing to be more fun and productive. We want to help make it safer. So, in this Vivaldi update, we have implemented support for Hardware Key Authentications.