The perfect mouseless FreeBSD desktop | Hacker News Reader

The perfect mouseless FreeBSD desktop

mapleoin.bluepink.ro

24 pointsmapleoin13 comments

I have a similar setup. Xmonad as the window manager, conkeror for the web browser (why would an emacs user use vimperator?), and emacs for everything else. (I also use rxvt-unicode, since it is scriptable in Perl and handles Unicode correctly.)

Some other things I use:

* bitlbee for non-IRC chat networks. I keep irssi running under screen on my remote server, and this means I am always on IRC and AIM (which I use instead of email, mostly). I get IRC/AIM/Jabber in emacs via ERC and irssi-proxy from the remote server.

* xmms2. It manages my music library like Amarok or iTunes does, but is very easy to control from external scripts. Back when I used amarok, I would always have to switch from emacs to my amarok desktop to change to a song by name. Now, with the help of a small perl script, I can hit C-c a a in emacs to change to any song I want. It's great.

The only major issue I have being mouseless is that there is always the occasional website that doesn't work right in Conkeror (hello, Stack Overflow), and I haven't found a good PDF reader yet. #xmonad didn't have much to say, so I use emacs for now. It is definitely non-optimal, though.

Anyway, I agree with the sentiment expressed in this article. Pretty desktops are nearly worthless for productivity. They may help inexperienced users achieve some minimal productivity, but once you are comfortable using your computer, they really get in the way.

Mouseless and WIMPless desktops are great. I've been using ratpoison for the last 6 months or so and I love it, previously I was using ION3 for about a year but I ended up not using the tabs at all, just having everything in fullscreen and using the hotkeys to switch between them. Of course it wouldn't work for everyone but when 99% of your computing time is spent in Emacs and Firefox it really does make sense.

Hopefully you are using a Firefox variant, like Conkeror or Vimperator.

Plain Firefox has an extremely unfriendly keyboard UI.

I've tried Conkeror and while I like the concept and can't really find any problem with the execution I just don't get on with it very well. Being an Emacs user I feel compelled to ignore Vimperator ;)

The ' key in Firefox (search for links) is great for navigating around without the mouse. Not that I'm religious about non-mousing of course, sometimes (especially during idle web surfing) it makes sense for me.

I've been looking for a decent mouseless wm for XP. The choices seem extremely limited.

I haven't quite gone the way of mouseless, but I am using vimperator. When using Firefox I was already trying to navigate using vim keybindings, being that I am in my editor for most of the day. Switching to vimperator was pretty natural.

dwm, dmenu, mrxvt, w3m, xzgf, vifm, mpg123, mplayer, vim, curl

dwm, dmenu, vim, xzgv, uxterm, ncmpc + mpc + mpd, sftp, vimperator, and fetch.

I also have an addon for firefox called mozex which will allow me to export a text feild to vim for editing.

Life is good. I will occasionally use my mouse, particuarlly if I'm at my desktop, where I will have a firefox window open but even then thats rare.

awesome, mrxvt, zsh, vim, finch, irssi

Awesome and XMonad are the only tiling window managers that handle multiple monitors in a sane fashion, and I happen to like Awesome's a little better than XMonad's. ( 9 virtual desktops per screen vs 9 virtual desktops shared between all screens )

This kind of suffering is for people who haven't yet figured out that "the red nipple" is the best pointing device bar none.

This: http://moc.daper.net/

Is a great console music player.

Until you have friends over and you're trying to explain how the he'll you're meant to find and play a track ;)

I can live with my mouse as long as I have Quicksilver.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com