Ask HN: graphical browsing for keyboard jockeys? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: graphical browsing for keyboard jockeys?

4 pointsrwl6 comments

I've recently decided to try out a tiling window manager, and interact with my desktop almost exclusively via the keyboard. I have quickly come to realize that essentially the only thing I need the mouse for is to interact with a Web browser.

So, I'm curious: What setups do people use for graphical browsing with keyboard navigation? Specifically, are there ways of doing the following from the keyboard in a browser that can display images and other media, run JavaScript, understand CSS, and so on?

- select a link by searching for its text (rather than tabbing through all links)

- select arbitrary text on the page

- provide access to the functions normally found on a right-click menu (e.g. Save Image As...)

- mouse-like scrolling on pages and in forms (I know most browsers already allow scrolling from the keyboard, but I have found that a number of sites -- usually JS-heavy or Flash-based ones -- break keyboard-based scrolling, though mouse-based scrolling works fine.)

Obviously, these things can readily be done from something like emacs-w3, but let's face it: choosing to use a text-based browser cuts you off from a large portion of the modern content on the Web, and even sites that have mostly textual content can be annoying to read in text-based browsers (e.g., when large amounts of "sidebar" content comes first on the page).

So, keyboard jockeys, what am I looking for here? An alternative browser? A Firefox plugin? A set of built-in keybindings I didn't know existed? Is there a happy marriage of graphical content and keyboard navigation out there?

You can search for text easily with chrome or firefox. With firefox, you can hit the quote key and search the links, pressing enter to navigate to the page. F3 goes to the next result. The same feature is not available in Chrome natively, for some obstinate reason. It kept me from switching to Chrome, but then I tried the type-ahead-find extension. It's a script so it won't be as fast as native, but it's so much better than nothing.

Firefox also has the Vimperator plugin that gives vim-like nav for Firefox. Highly recommended if you like Vim.

With firefox, you can hit the quote key and search the links, pressing enter to navigate to the page. F3 goes to the next result.

Didn't know that. That's handy, thanks!

Firefox also has the Vimperator plugin that gives vim-like nav for Firefox. Highly recommended if you like Vim.

I'm aware of Vimperator, but have never tried it, as I am an Emacs guy and about as useless with vi as I am with wild animals. It might be worth a look, though, if it does everything I mentioned above. (Does it?)

You can use the visual mode for selecting text, then operate on it with the usual vim business.

There are commands built in for a lot of actions, and if there is a right click option that the extension doesn't provide, you can always write a script to extend it. Vimperator is nicely extensible.

I'm not sure if Vim scrolling with hjkl resolves the issue you saw with the arrow keys- I'm sure that's site dependent, and you'll have to try it yourself.

Good luck!

Vimperator can definitely do all the things you listed though flash objects in a page can be an exception. Once the browser hands focus to the flash object, it's up to the flash object to have a shortcut to give it back. Some do, some don't.

It does have a bypass mode for javascript heavy sites like gmail, with builtin shortcuts. Some sites present issues with link detection, but vimperator is highly highly customizable, so given enough effort you can make almost anything work.

There is also a chrome plugin called vimium that has a smaller feature set.

I also found this: http://conkeror.org/ But I have not tried it. It appears to be a customized version of firefox with emacs style shortcuts.

If you Ctrl+F to some link text in Chrome and hit escape, it focuses the link so that hitting enter will navigate to the page.

Not quite the same, but I use it all the time.

Conkeror (http://conkeror.org)

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