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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

I'm somewhat skeptic regarding pro tools that take a lifetime to master (never got to like emacs for example, and I like MacOS dar more than customizing a Linux distro) but there are some mouseless skills that are such a game changer for me I almost can't use a pc without them, everything else becomes too frustrating. Vimium to browse the web is a Godsend for example.

No need to learn for weeks, it's:

-j/k for scrolling

- J/K move around tabs

- f to click a link

- gg/G to go to the top/bottom of the page

- o to enter new url

Not exactly the most intuitive keywords if you haven't used vim, but you try that a couple hours and then using a mouse feels like clicking edit -> copy instead of doing ctrl-C.

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I took a look at all of the shortcuts that Vimium offers, and beside the f/F to open the link, other shortcuts are already available natively in Chrome, like:

* arrow keys/PgUp/PgDn for scrolling

* Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn for switching tabs

* Home/End for top/bottom of page

* Ctrl-U for source

* Ctrl-L for switching to the omnibox

* etc

I guess some people might wince at the fact that they have to touch the arrow keys or Home/End/PgUp/PgDn, but my keyboard has those keys and I'm used to it.

Besides the fact that you leave the home row, I'm not sure why but scrolling is quite significantly better when using vimium, at least on macOS.

Using the arrow keys makes the page scroll jerkily, in a way that complicates reading while you move. Using j/k (or u/d for fast scrolling) produces a smooth result similar to scrolling with the touchpad or a phone/tablet scroll.

I use a 60% keyboard, so the arrow keys map to "fn + WASD", which gives me the 'benefit' of not having to move my hand to a dedicated mouse cluster while still being an easy to use key-combination as WASD is natural to gamers.

I mean in the end, who really cares though? Whatever is comfortable to you is probably the best choice.

There's also H for opening a previous history entry or switching to a different tab you have open. This is a big one for me (along with the Auto-Discard extension) since it lets me keep a very large number of tabs open and not have to iterate through every open tab when I want to find something I opened previously again.

You can now add a trigger to focus things instead of click them too, which helps with some hover based menus.

I'm a vimium user and I wasn't aware of this, how useful! I checked the docs and I can't find it, do you know what it's called or how to do it please?

If you go to Vimium options and enter this line into the custom key mappings it should work:

    map c LinkHints.activateMode action=hover

You can change c to whatever key you want to trigger it. It works perhaps less often than I was hoping for, a lot of menus still won't work, presumably because they use JS or something else to trigger the menu.

These tools take a lifetime to master, that's true; but I could code in Neovim in two weeks. I think if you decide seriously to learn it, you can be effective with it pretty fast.

Easy to learn, hard to master. That's what I like, because you never stop learning.

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