I decided that I today would try to use the mouse less and the keyboard more. Mostly to increase productivity, you lose a lot of time and momentum every time you lift your right hand from the keyboard to the mouse, but also to lower the risk of developing problems like mouse-arm and so on.
I’m already using a trackball instead of a normal mouse and if I don’t use an ergonomic keyboard my wrists start to hurt after a while. So I figured anything that can make me faster and feel better is a good thing.
However, I’ve noticed then I’m using firefox I almost constantly have one hand on the trackball. Either I’m using the scroll wheel to navigate the web page or clicking on links to continue to other pages. If I could reduce my dependency on the mouse for this thing, that would be a major improvement.
So this morning I fired up firefox and started googling around a bit and it didn’t take long until I found the shortcut that will hopefully revolutionize my web surfing.
Find as you type link = ‘
I knew about find as you type text = / before and that one is is very useful but ‘ for finding links is even more useful!
Instead of doing this then you see a link:
- Lift your right hand off the keyboard and place it on the mouse
- Move the mouse cursor to the desired link
- Press the mouse button
- Move the right hand back to the keyboard
I now do this:
- Press ‘
- Enter the first few letters of the desired link
- If it found the right link, press enter, otherwise use ctrl-g until the desired link is found
It is so much more convenient! Not to mention how much faster it is!
If you want to open the link in a new tab instead, just press ctrl-enter and if you want a new window press shift-enter.