Comment by DavidVoid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DavidVoid | Hacker News Reader

Always good to see companies put some effort into good keyboard navigation!

If you want a keyboard-first interface for your web browser I can recommend Vimium (which I'm sure a lot of you have already heard of). I'm not actually a Vim user (at least not yet), but I rely pretty heavily on Vimium's shortcuts in Firefox nowadays. I started using it when I had a school-provided laptop which had an awful trackpad which was way too slow and annoying to use for my taste.

Vimium: https://vimium.github.io/

Screenshot of shortcuts in Vimium: https://i.imgur.com/x1Y7OvQ.png

EDIT: I almost forgot to mention my favorite feature (which is not limited to Vimium).

Custom search engines are great! If I want to go to the Wikipedia page on aviation then I can just press Shift+o and type w aviation and it will immediately open that Wikpedia page in a new tab.

The other search engines I frequently use are: google translate, thesaurus (synonyms), and justwatch (to see if/where a show/movie is available in my country).

If you're going down that route I recommend Qutebrowser[0].

I'm a pretty staunch advocate of it since it doesn't feel at all like a "hack" of vim in the browser, and because it's chromium basically all websites work. (However, I am contributing to the monopoly of chrome based browsers, which is a bad thing in my personal opinion).

It's also easy to extend, I think it's the ultimate hacking browser.

PS: it takes a little tinkering to get really nice looking on MacOS.

[0]: https://www.qutebrowser.org/

There are a couple of annoying things with vimium which, I think, are general limitations for Firefox extensions, or browser addons in general: - it loads after the page, so if you mistakenly open a link, you have to wait until the page is fully loaded to close it with the extension, but you can always use the browser's integrated shortcut Ctrl+W. So far so good - Letters positions are not as accurate as let's say, qutebrowser, and sometimes when you open a link it's not the right one, even if the letter was indicating it. For a clear illustration of what I'm trying to say, try to browse stackoverflow and use the reviews queue. - When the page is saturated, letters start overlapping, you find yourself with one link hovered by 'A' and another 'AA' maybe a couple of links labelled: 'AB', 'AC', ... and in this situation it's impossible to select the link 'A', you have to do it with the mouse.

>Custom search engines...

Firefox has had this feature for many many years.

I press ctrl+L (keyboard focus to location bar) type "w aviation" and press enter.

It's built in already as a default feature. To add a custom search to Firefox, right click on the search field and click "Add keyword for this search". I chose "w" for Wikipedia like you have.

Chrome does this more simply, but the feature is less discoverable. you don't have to create the keywords manually, you just hit tab after entering the URL where the search box is located. since the URL is autocompleted, for frequently used websites this is a matter of typing the first two or three characters and then hitting right arrow.

You can also set up custom short codes for search engines in Chrome. I use gh for GitHub and w for Wikipedia for example. Just type gh space react and use the keyboard navigation on github to navigate further. A lot of keyboard enabled sites have set up ? key for help about keyboard commands.

Alternatively, in any browser, set DuckDuckGo (or Qwant, or another search engine with !bangs support) as your default search engine, then press Ctrl+L and type `!w aviation` - or `!npm some-package` or `!wt dictionary word` or `!g google search term` etc.

> Always good to see companies put some effort into good keyboard navigation!

Yup. I'd also like to see companies put some effort into publishing a complete list of their keyboard shortcuts. How hard can this be? grrrr

I often find highly useful undocumented shortcuts by hitting the key combination by accident.

We'll add a /help command showing general usage and a list of all keys and what they do :)

Yay!

I have found tridactyl a great keyboard-driven navigation tool for browsers, with insane customizability. (Example - want to copy the git clone address into your clipboard? Just press `yg`)

Try https://hop.sh I launch it two days ago here on HN. It's a bookmark tool with a customizable search bar (like bangs on duck duck go)

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