I’ve been trying to use the mouse on my main desktop machine less, because it’s awkward to use when I’m typing away in my ‘recliner’ position which has been helping my back. On my MacBook, the trackpad is a joy, and while it’s possible to get keyboards with in-built trackpads, I like my current keyboard and don’t want to get rid of it, or to get a separate trackpad / trackball which will be awkward.
I don’t need the mouse most of the time anyway, VisualAssist makes it particularly easy to get around Visual Studio without the mouse (ALT-M to jump to a method, ALT-O to flip between header / source file, SHIFT-ALT-O to jump to a file, etc) and XCode is already pretty good in that regard, but navigating around Firefox with only a keyboard was a problem. Sure there’s CTRL-L and CTRL-K for the location and search boxes, CTRL-B for bookmarks, CTRL-TAB to flip between tabs etc, but once you’re on a page, following links was awkward – your only option was to tab through the links laboriously, trying to keep an eye on where the focus was going. Not fun.
Luckily, the Mouseless Browsing plugin solves all that. It places numerical ID boxes next to every link, and all you have to do is type the number to follow the link. It looks like this:
So by default you can type ’6 Enter’ to get to the ‘About Me’ page for example. If I want to open that in a new tab, I type ’6 Plus Enter’ (the numpad is the most convenient). There’s a bunch of configuration options, such as allowing you to turn off the IDs and just have them toggle on when you press a button, which is what I generally prefer (so site styles are not interfered with), or to remove the need to press Enter at the end of the sequence based on some timings. All in all, very useful.
October 21st, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Bah. Real men use the vimperator.
http://vimperator.mozdev.org/
October 21st, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Steve, I was interested in the keyboard link and checked it out. Very nice! I’ve been wanting a new keyboard for some time but couldn’t find anything I like. We share the same preferences, I love flat keys and quick/quiet typing. Are you still using the same keyboard? If you know any good ones feel free to toss out names, maybe I’ll pick up a new keyboard for Christmas.
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:39 am
For real mouslessness, use Vimperator. I use it everyda, and I love it.
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:23 am
I’ve been using Opera without a mouse at all for years now. 1 and 2 = next/prev tab, shift + arrows = move around links on page (it’s smart about it). Enter = go to link, Shift + Enter = open link in new tab, shift + ctrl + enter = open link in background tab etc etc.
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:24 am
I also use a ‘rubber nipple’ IBM keyboard. Mice and Flash gave me RSI, but the nipple is perfect. You get used to it quickly and it’s really good.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:07 am
@Ciaran/nikki: I’ve looked at vimperator, and practically speaking see little benefit to it over Mouseless Firefox beyond the ‘geek’ factor. I use Vim to edit a lot of the time, but can think of almost no Vim features I’d use when browsing. I just want fast keyboard-based link following, which both do equally well. Is there some killer feature I’m missing here?
@Vectrex: Opera sounds better out of the box, but on a page with lots of links, being able to launch the link directly is much faster than spatially navigating. I’ve tried to use a nipple keyboard before and not really liked it – if I had to replace my keyboard I’d replace it with one with a trackpad rather than a nipple.
@KungFooMasta: yes, I still use my Enermax and like it a lot. However if I was buying again I’d probably go for the Microsoft Comfort Curve which is cheaper and has a nice ergonomic curve in it too. It’s not aluminium though
October 22nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I use the Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 at work, it doesn’t give the same feel as laptop keyboards which I like. I think I’ll look into getting an Enermax, I read some reviews and saw more pics, and it looks like a really good keyboard.
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I happen to have the Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000. Its good for the price. I just found that the keys right in the middle are slightly wider with the curve, I found I was hitting the wrong keys a little when I first had it. But I quickly got use to it. Though an aluminium keyboard would be nice
.
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
@Steve: Well, of course the real Vim editing features won’t play any role, but its really nice being able to move around with ‘hjkl’, or Ctrl+D and Ctrl+U, set marks and get back to ‘em, copy URLs with just a ‘y’ and such. Many editing keys have been mapped to do other browser-like things, such as ‘d’ for delete tab, and ‘u’ for undo delete tab. You can also write a ~/.vimperatorrc similar to a ~/.vimrc. Many options can also be set with a simple ‘:set option=value’. You can map things with ‘:map’. There are a lot of other cool features than simple keyboard-based link following. You feel right at home if you use Vim a lot, which you said you do.
And as you said of course, the ‘geek’ factor is another big selling point.
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Sorry for the double post, but I felt the need to add that, in vimperator, the ‘:o url’ ex-command takes you to the given URL. It checks the URL first, and if it isn’t URL-ish, it performs a Google search on it. The first argument to
can also be recognised as a search engine, like, for example, ‘:o wikipedia vim’ searches Wikipedia for Vim.
By default, the ‘o’ key is bound to ‘:o ‘, so you just press ‘o’ instead of ‘:’ then ‘o’ and then a space and type stuff.
Another cool feature: In any text box in a web page, pressing Ctrl+I opens that in Vim (as a temporary file), for you to edit, and a ‘:wqa’ from that vim session will insert the new text in the text box (for this, AFAIK, ‘vim’ should be in the $PATH).