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Finally, a use for numeric keypads… March 8, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : web , trackback

I now have one less reason to use a mouse with the discovery of Rudolf Noe’s Mouseless Browsing extension for Firefox.

Here’s a screenshot of how it decorates the page with tiny link ids, that can be navigated by entering the displayed number, followed by enter.

Screenshot of Mouseless Firefox

Furthermore, Mouseless Browsing can be granted priority access to the keypad so that regular numbers continue to be entered into form fields and the like, whilst numeric keypad presses are used for link navigation. The links can be hidden by default, with a quick double-tap of NumLock bringing them into a view… another double tap dismisses them. It appears to give priority to submit buttons as well, although some pages seem to provoke a rather hapzard numbering of links.

Now, if only it was either;

  1. available for Safari, or
  2. Firefox didn’t suck on OS X,

life would be complete!

Meanwhile I have been playing around with Colibri (Quicksilver for Windows) at work to see if it makes me more productive on WinXP. It does a good job of figuring out the application or Control Panel applet that I want to launch. I find the keyboard navigability of most Windows apps to be better than many OS X applications anyway (gasp!) so I don’t need to replicate Quicksilver’s (via a plugin) menu navigation functionality, and I don’t need it’s tight integration with OS X at work, alas. The chief sticking point I have with Colibri is that its trigger hotkey, ctrl + space, also happens to be one of the major keybindings of IntelliJ, the tool I am spending most of my time in anyway. It would be great if Colibri (and Quicksilver for that matter, I am presuming I would have the same problem on OS X) could be configured to ignore the hotkey when a certain set of applications has the focus. And whilst I’m asking for things, a .NET API as well for plugins would be cool!

Comments»

1. Toby - March 9, 2006

You can change the hotkey in Colibri easily enough..

2. James Webster - March 9, 2006

True. I am just being bloody minded in not wanting to reprogram my muscle memory, and hoping that the tools can solve the problem for me!

3. Damien - March 10, 2006

Awesome! I have been wanting something like this, but couldn’t find the greasemonkey for it.

Firefox does not suck so much on OS X. I have a nice Safari Firefox theme. It is a bit slow though, but so is Safari, and printing to pdf does not seem to work so well though…and any pages with java in it are flaky…actually Firefox sucks on OS X.