Go to previous/next page

[asymmetric]

As mentioned in #18, it would be great to have a keybinding for 'prev', 'next' links.

This is useful for navigating forums, github issues, long articles, etc. On VimFx, the keybindings were [, and ].

[lydell]

Just wanted to share my experience with this feature from VimFx, both as a user and as an implementor:

This is a VimFx feature I kinda liked, but also disliked a bit. The thing is that you more or less have to learn which pages it works on. When you press ] in VimFx, one of three things happen:

• You’re taken to the next page as expected.
• You’re taken to an unexpected page (because some link happened to match a “next” pattern).
• Nothing at all happens.

So I mostly didn’t use it. Only on a few forums I often visit, for github issues listings, and for search results on a couple of pages.

Another weakness of the feature is that users mostly have to customize the default patterns for their language. For example, adding “nästa” as a “next” pattern and “föregående” as a “previous” pattern for Swedish.

Here’s the VimFx implementation. It’s mostly regex search. But also nasty a hardcoded hack to make things work on Google.

• https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/376486f4dc61d75add1c26263d1f4baf39d3abd4/extension/lib/commands-frame.coffee#L484-L539
• https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/376486f4dc61d75add1c26263d1f4baf39d3abd4/extension/lib/parse-prefs.coffee#L50-L69
• https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/376486f4dc61d75add1c26263d1f4baf39d3abd4/extension/lib/defaults.coffee#L151-L152
• https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/376486f4dc61d75add1c26263d1f4baf39d3abd4/extension/lib/defaults.coffee#L177-L180 (https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/commit/b4e73c77b7b026a3bf5430f001c992f745e5066d)

Here are some tricky issues:

• https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/836
• https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/792

I guess what I’m trying to say is that copying VimFx is not super difficult. But then you also inherit that half-good experience, and open a can of worms. You can also try to come up with a better heuristic for finding the links. Or make a database of selectors for every site, like the old Autopagerize extension/userscript: http://wedata.net/databases/AutoPagerize/items_all.json. It also feels like machine learning would be appropriate for this challenge ... how far down this rabbit hole can we go?

[asymmetric]

I would be fine with it only working when there's a <link rel=prev/next/first/last> (which honestly is how it should be implemented by websites anyway).

I agree with you that it was annoying that it didn't always work, but hey, that's not the plugin's fault necessarily.

[WishCow]

I think even with the shortcomings that @lydell mentioned, it was a great feature, I would be perfectly okay with that implementation.

[eejdoowad]

Placeholders for these commands actually already exist in Saka Key's source code. I'll probably end up porting VimFX's implementation when I get around to it.

https://key.saka.io/dev_docs/adding_commands

[alexherbo2]

How about implementing the commands as site plug-in?

Access to Site mode on Space, and [ and ] commands to go to the previous and next page.

A global and naive implementation could be added.

The site could hijack the global implementation.

Interactive creation of plug-in would be neat for non-developers.

It would seamless allow the Next / Previous page functionalities creation.

All that on-the-fly.

[Stebalien]

@alexherbo2 FYI, rel=next/prev/etc... is in the standard: https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html#sequential-link-types (for what that's worth, anyways).

[alexherbo2]

Yep, I don’t know for you, but none of the sites I use use that. XD

[Stebalien]

Ah. Sorry, I assumed you wanted sites to implement this. I agree it would be nice to be able to override commands (really, all commands) for arbitrary websites. However, I believe that discussion belongs in #45.

[grepsuzette]

Since searching "bing" in 'issues' gave me nothing, I would like to mention the prev and next page did not work for me on Bing. It seems to be because their prev/next buttons don't have any text, and also lack something like rel="next".

I have created a greasyfork to have those buttons get the rel="prev" and rel="next" attribute needed to make them work with Saka: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/390762-bing-rel-next-prev

But it's a mystery for me why while the next button works perfectly with Saka (]), the prev button ([ here) also acts as a next (and not a prev). Where's the bug? I already double checked the greasyscript and my mapping in Saka for [ and ] but also find it hard to believe it would come from Saka.