thoughtcrumbs

Quicker than quicksilver: Mouse-free on the mac

Sometimes it's tough to be a strong advocate for both Macs and ergonomics. Love shouldn't hurt. Even with Quicksilver (the omnipresent app that enables keyboard shortcuts for just about everything) and the most ergonomic desk setup of any computer professional, I find myself thwarted by window management and other ubiquitous tasks that require dragging or clicking, both of which aggravate my RSI.

So last week I put my ergonomic trackball on the far corner of my desk and looked for keyboard shortcuts for everything. And I found some surprisingly amazing tools. SizeUp and gleeBox are particularly life-changing (and have excellent demos):

SizeUp: Window management heaven. Shortcuts for window tiling, expansion, sending to other monitors.

Gleebox: Keyboard-centric web navigation. Type a snippet of link text to jump to that link. Type ?? to jump to the first form field. Type !read to get a readable version.

Google experimental search keyboard shortcuts: Search for something. Hit Enter to accept the first result. J jumps to the next one. K jumps back one. (Somewhat unecessary with Gleebox, but even faster, at one single keystroke.)

MacVim: An app version of my favorite text editor, Vi, which everybody hates because it's modal. But modal means single-key navigation. Sweetness. And, well, it looks intimidating. One problem with Vi run through the terminal is buffer management (you can't copy and paste without the mouse between terminal vi and, say, TextEdit). MacVim fixes this. And there's a sweet color sampler pack.

Applescript + Quicksilver: Lost of common Mac actions can be scripted and assigned a Quicksilver trigger. Most of those applescripts are out there on the interwebs, like the one I modified to send a Mac mail message to an archive folder with a single key.

And of course, the basic lists of keyboard shortcuts for Mac OSX and Chrome, and Google Calendar are useful.