Show HN: gleeBox, keyboard glee for your web | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: gleeBox, keyboard glee for your web

thegleebox.com

39 pointsankit_31 comments

I love it. I've been looking for something like this for a while now. I was a Vimperator user for quite a while, but just couldn't use it anymore. I ran into too many issues, and I think the feel just wasn't there.

I support anybody who tries to make me use my mouse less, and the browser is the biggest pain point right now in that arena :)

Would you mind expanding on the issues you ran into with Vimperator?

Hey great work on your plugin! But I must say I'll stick with vimperator, and this would be for the love of just one feature: Hints.

Hints allow you to select a link, either by numbers assigned to each link in your current page view, or by typing the link's name.

Maybe I misunderstood the way gleeBox works, but from what I've tested, you can select all links (with ?a) but you then have to navigate to the correct one by repeatedly pressing TAB? That's a show stopper for me.

But like I said, kudos for the initiative.

On a related note there's a standalone browser with vimperator-like features currently under developpment although the available versions are more than usable: http://www.uzbl.org . When it gets stable, I'll definitely dump firefox/vimperator :)

Thanks. The default behavior of gleeBox is to search for links when you enter any text.

So, you can simply enter a part of the text of the link you want to go to. If multiple links have the same text, you can TAB your way to the right link. You don't need to use ?a.

I'm a real newb. :) Thanks for clarifying. It's mentionned in the user manual, but to be honnest I just read the big highlights about the commands not the text.. Sorry sir :). And again, great job.

On a related note, Google Experimental Labs lets you enable Vim-style navigational shortcuts for search results: http://www.google.com/experimental/

You should really remake the screencast, I can barely hear the voice.

I can make you a voice recording for the screencast, if you like, just give me the text to read. That's my little hobby. See examples in my blog.

Strange, the sound level seems to be reasonable for me on all the machines I've heard the video on...

Well, the sound level is okay, but I can barely understand what he says.

I use vimperator for firefox, it uses vim-style command-line. Works great and is extensible. http://vimperator.org/

I'm also a user of vimperator. I wish someone would port it to Google Chrome as I'm tired of beeing locked in to Firefox.

gleeBox and vimperator differ a lot in the way they work even though their core functionality is the same, that is to aid in navigation.

And, with gleeBox, you can do a lot more like search bookmarks, execute bookmarklets, yubnub commands, etc. Plus, I think it is more easy to use for the non-vim junkies :)

Searching bookmarks are available by default in vimperator. You can easily create a yubnub command and assign a hotkey for it, i think. And since vimperator can execute any javascript code from its command line, you can execute bookmarklets.

I use vimperator as well. it gives you the ability to follow links using the keyboard (same tab, new tab, copy link) as well as all the bookmarky shortcut stuff that gleebox does. Combine it with a keyboard based window manager (like StumpWM) and you can (almost) throw your mouse away!

Another idea 1. Delete ads by command - del div.classname (but for that a user will have to know the classname for that div, maybe an inspect html shortcut for selected item like the letter i, ?) or delete a.parentNode 2. Check/Uncheck checkboxes and click submit buttons (Maybe)

#1 - What do you mean by deleting an ad? Do you mean to hide an element on a page whenever that page is opened? I'm not sure how the inspect command will work, though.

#2 - Makes sense.

1. Launch gleebox, search for link. once link is selected type :i or :i.parentNode (or maybe a shorthand for that :i^1 or :i^2 which could mean :i.parentNode.parentNode) once you inspect an element del should be starighforward. And del commands for particular page can also be persisted and run for subsequent visits.And have separate options for persisting del commands and running them on subsequent page visit.

Feel free to ignore these suggestions if you think it will affect usability and bring more complexity.

This might make it a bit too complicated.

Feature request : search tipjar for ESP related to current site via gleebox and accept result in gleebox itself without going to options.

That's a crazy but a very useful feature request. Wish it was easier and a little less time-consuming to implement.

Maybe someday... :)

We'll love any feedback. Thanks!

I like it, but here's one big issue: Using ! as the command char is a pain. It's two combined keystrokes to produce that character. If you used a dot (.) or a space ( ) as the command char, you would reduce the overhead of entering a command by at least 100 %.

If you could allow the user to specify the command char, it would be awesome. Great work, though!

Thanks! Makes sense to avoid multiple keystrokes wherever possible. Maybe in a future version we could do this.

You should definitely make this configurable. I used to use hit a hint (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1341), but found it would sometimes capture _all_ presses of the spacebar/ctrl key/whatever you configured. This made it practically impossible to enter text on some websites. It started happening more and more often, which meant I ended up turning HaH off.

GleeBox looks great. Echoing another posters comments, the mouse-centric navigation of the web really gets to me. Anything that lessons mouse usage gets my vote!

Thanks for the feedback, will toy with the idea of custom modifiers. We experimented with a couple of other options before choosing !, it just felt right in combination with the other modifiers.

1. I would love if you can add a feature to click the 'play' button on a flash video through the keyboard shortcut. For example on your own page http://thegleebox.com/ there is a video, but to watch that I have to use the mouse.

2. Searching google and other search engines without going through yubnub command (eliminate the extra HTTP get). I know i can search google through the address bar and the search box on top right, typing 'g' is much easier than command+L and command+K.

3. ability to pin/unpin the gleebox so it does not disappear despite http refresh when I open a link in the same tab.

Also How about implementing login functionality to websites with such a command ?

lo::facebook (could use your save username/password in firefox) or lo:facebook -u username -p password

Since many a times the login page on websites is uninteresting

That sounds useful. We'll think about it. Thanks!

Item 2 actually works if the text typed is not in any links, my bad :(

We actually tried to implement the #1 feature. But, as it turns out, there is no easy way of doing that via JavaScript. It definitely would've been awesome.

For #3, we experimented with a hyperglee mode. In that mode, gleeBox shows up automatically when you open a page. It actually exists but is an undocumented feature (since we weren't completely satisfied with the results) :)

In Chrome, you can turn the hyper mode on/off by executing '!set hyper=on/off'. Doesn't work too well in Firefox, though.

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