What's the difference between Vimperator and Pentadactyl?

Question

I've been using vimperator for a few months and loving it (although it makes it hard for me to go back to primitive mousery on others' computers). I've seen that there's a fork called Pentadactyl, but I can't tell what the difference is. Is there any particular reason to use one over the other? Why was it forked?

Answer 1

I am the project founder and still main developer of Vimperator. I have summarized my own perceived differences between the two projects here:

http://code.google.com/p/vimperator-labs/wiki/VimperatorVsPentadactyl

Please read the whole page, but if you really need a short summary, because you just wasted time fighting Pentadactyl's complexity ;), here it is:

• Vimperator: The main focus is on usability, simplicity, stability and design while still preserving a powerful, modal browsing experience influenced by Vim.
• Pentadactyl: The aim is to create a complex beast, where hackers with too much free time can do any (un-)imaginable thing. Also focuses more on 1:1 Vim compatibility.

Hope this helps a little. I am sure both projects have their target audiences.

Martin

Answer 2

Maybe the FAQ section on the page you linked to could be helpful, in particular http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/faq#faq-differences and http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/faq#faq-fork .

The main difference is that Vimperator's most active developers have moved on to Pentadactyl. More qualitative changes may be found in the change log, but essentially add up to what we consider more active and thoughtful development.

Among the most visible differences, as of Pentadactyl 1.0, are more extensive Firefox 4 support, significantly better startup time and completion performance, considerably better :sanitize and private mode support, a greatly improved incremental find implementation, major improvements in Ex command parsing (including the ability to separate commands with | and split long commands across lines), conditionals (:if/:else) in configuration files, greatly updated documentation, and a number of bug fixes.