Hacker News Reader

Comment by dqv | Hacker News Reader

There are custom keyboards, they're just hard to find. The Devlin KMX-144 or the Logic Controls LK1800 come to mind. I'm sure there are others. You can use (n?)curses to make a terminal user interface.

I still prefer the web - just with the keyboard as a first class citizen.

View on HN

I don’t think webapps can ever make the keyboard a first class citizen. The browser already has a bunch of keybindings.

Personally, I’ve never used a web app that I actually liked or trusted. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m always worried the page will time out or refresh or something.

Like imagine emacs or vim in a browser window, it would be horrible!

Try vimium, I've been using it for years - as long as the HTML is semantically correct a surprisingly amount of the web is navigable.

I wasn't going to mention qutebrowser[0] since I didn't think it was relevant, but it works well. Most of the keys in the browser can actually be rebound. With keyboards like I mentioned, the additional keys can be mapped to special key combos like `Alt+Shift+D` to avoid collisions.

It's also possible to map most or all of Chrome's (not sure about other browsers - but we're talking within the enterprise) keys can be rebound. Check out keycode.info - every key even ones like `Alt+D` and F1 and even `Ctrl+R` can be rebound and prevented from doing their normal function in place of something else!

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com