Friday, May 21, 2010

Mouseless Browsing

Once you write a book, you become really immersed in the subject matter. After it's off to the publisher, you can't turn off your interest in the subject. Consequently, after The Productive Programmer came out, I continue to find new ways to make myself more productive. One of my recent tendencies is mouseless browsing.

I have a love/hate affair with Firefox. I love the keyboard affordances it provides, especially the slash ("/") and apostrophe ("'") shortcuts. When looking at a web page, the slash starts an incremental find for text within the page. The apostrophe does something similar, but it restricts the matches to URLs only. How many times do you go to a web site and you know the name of the link you want already? For example, if I need to go to the ThoughtWorks web site to get the address of the London location (this happened earlier today), I know (or can guess) that there is a "Contact" link on the home page, which takes me to a list of offices. In my new mouseless browsing mode, I go to the home page thoughtworks.com, hit the apostrophe and start typing "contact", hit enter and now I'm on the contact page. From there, I can hit the slash key and start typing "London". I've found my address and never taken my fingers off the home row. This added to the spacebar to scroll down and shift-spacebar to scroll up and you can get a lot done in a browser without a mouse.

I maintain a love/hate relationship because one of the cool things about Firefox is all the plug-ins available. Conversely, one of the things I hate about Firefox are all the plug-ins! I tend to find useful plug-ins and add them, which adds to the weight (and start up time) for the whole browser. Recently, I stumbled across Camino, which uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, which means that my 2 favorite keyboard shortcuts work. Camino is very lightweight (if "feels" lighter than Safari) and it supports my browsing habits. This is going to sound odd, but one of the critical things that it supports is the ability to type a partial URL in the address bar (which it will auto-complete) and hit CTRL-N to move the cursor down to the first (or subsequent) matches. This is a big deal for me because the Emacs key bindings are deeply ingrained in my fingers (and most of OS X, as it turns out), but Firefox doesn't allow this. Firefox has apparently overwritten the CTRL-N key to do nothing (overriding the operating system). While this sounds minor, it bites me every time. Fortunately, Camino adheres to the Apple standard, allowing me to have my cake (having CTRL-N move down one line, as it was Meant To Be) and keyboard-driven browsing.

If you really want to go far down this path, there is the Conkeror browser. It's "About:"

Conkeror is a keyboard-oriented, highly-customizable, highly-extensible web browser based on Mozilla XULRunner, written mainly in JavaScript, and inspired by exceptional software such as Emacs and vi. Conkeror features a sophisticated keyboard system, allowing users to run commands and interact with content in powerful and novel ways. It is self-documenting, featuring a powerful interactive help system.

I have played with Conkeror and it has strong promise, but it's not quite mature enough for me to switch to daily use.

And if you are a Vim junkie, you can use the Firefox plugin called vimperator, which converts Firefix to a purely vi interface. Not for the faint of heart: if you don't know how to quit Vim, you're going to have a tough time with vimperator. Hard-core Vim-mers swear by this, but I'm too far gone down the Emacs route now to re-map the genes in my fingertips.

Mouseless browsing takes acclimatization, but once you become accustomed to it, you'll start finding it annoying to reach for a mouse (or even for the arrow keys -- not the home row!). This is why I have no interest in Chrome for now because it doesn't support my normal mode of browsing.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Great post =)
Must admit i have been very lazy trying to "fix" my browsing habbits. I guess its one of those things you just really have to be passionate about as a human - breaking habbits that is!

Kinda funny i actually gave up on chrome for almost the same reason. When i type in the address line, i use tab to go through the suggest list (in firefox) - this didnt work initially in chrome.. hence i ditched it within minutes of trying it. (i dont know if they "fixed" it.. and dont care much atm.)

A funny lil tool, that i have yet to fully explore is actually a plugin for firefox, called Lol - with default settings it allows you to hit space followed by a number of the link you want to visit - it highlights them with the numbers ofc.. This ive actually found semi useful - but it takes a bit of habit breaking! However it can save alot of mouse time - and you dont have to type the beginning of the link, as you do with "'" - plus you get links on images etc shown as well. Nifty stuff tho!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8781/

Anyways great post =)

Paweł Badeński said...

Opera really shines in mouseless browsing. It got an amazing mechanism of moving to a certain hyperlink with arrow keys (shift+arrow key). This feature is actually the reason I switched to Opera (soothing for your wrists when you use touchpad a lot). The only problems I found yet is inability to do copy-paste without touching the mouse. Also from time to time you are forced to switch to other browser in order to watch some sites (for me it's "Look inside" on Amazon).

john bailo said...

Yes, indeed. What I've done for myself is to create a Firefox plugin that makes it operate like the Lynx browser. I call it the TUI Bar (Text User Interface) and I can put in simple commands such as to go to a particular hyperlink and run that.

I'm adding more to syntax.

MARNUNEFREI said...

Out of curiosity: MÊME in French means THE SAME and AGORA in Portuguese means NOW. The same now! Nice title don’t you think?

Guilherme Garnier said...

Nice post. I also use a lot of keyboard shortcuts on Firefox.

Another very useful Firefox extension is Speed Dial (which Opera has by default). After configuring your favorite links (assigning a number to each one), you just type control+# to open that link, or control+shift+# to open on a new tab.

Is there any advantage of "/" shortcut over control+F? The latter shows a few more options.

lerntagebuch said...

There's an extension simliar to Firefox' Vimperator, Vimium.

Not having a vim-like mouseless controls for chromium was a reason not to use it in the past.

The "follow link" function in Vimium is even better then in Vimperator:
In Vimium you press f (to follow a link) and have to type e.g. AS to follow a link (i.e. not leave your home keys).
In Vimperator one has to type digits like 45, i.e. leave your homekeys, and at least for me it's more difficult to type numbers blindly without the numpad.

Mark said...

I use Camino as well... is there any way to access links that are graphics based and not text based with just the keyboard (arrows for example)?