Using the mouse has always bugged me a little, ever since the days of AmigaOS 1.3. I’ve always been used to keeping hands on the keyboard (my old Spectrum +3 has the slightly textured plastic worn smooth where my palms rested!) and having to reach over, grab the mouse, aim the pointer at something, and click it, while certainly convenient, isn’t exactly quick.
I tend to pop open a shell window to do even basic file handling, and have convenient “launcher” systems on all 3 OSes I happen to use: Gnome Deskbar on Ubuntu, Launchy on Windows, and Quicksilver on the Mac. I edit using Vim (enough said there). But what about when you get into an application? In particular, email and web browsing, with Thunderbird and Firefox.
Both Firefox and Thunderbird have useful keyboard shortcuts and can be driven without the mouse, but it’s not always convenient to tab around hundreds of links, or use the “quick find” in Firefox, and some common operations in Thunderbird are buried under multiple menu layers.
Fortunately, other people, who are able to write extensions, have also thought of this.
In Firefox, the major problem is stepping around between links. The Mouseless Browsing extension is a great solution to that. Some sites which are pretty heavy on the AJAX, including the Wordpress admin pages, might not play as nice as would be preferred, but I’m finding my trips to the mouse much reduced now for most web browsing work.
For Thunderbird, the major problem is in navigating between folders, and moving messages around. The Nostalgy extension fixes that little issue with one-key activation of move/copy/goto and selection is via a completion menu. Now I can jump to the inbox by typing gin<ENTER> no matter where I am. Moving a message into archival is just as easy. (Thunderbird extensions were found by way of Summersault.)
