A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

PaperVM is really neat. Much simpler to setup, learn and understand than for example i3.

I switched to mousing left-handed at some point, years ago. I noticed some of my left-handed colleagues mousing wrong-handed, possibly because of right-handed siblings, and getting some good use out of having pen and paper more easily accessible because of it. I decided I'd do the same.

Something I didn't expect: with my left hand on the home row, I can touch the mouse by stretching my little finger. So it's no effort at all to put my hand on it and use it to move the cursor. And so I've pretty much given up entirely on using the keyboard for arbitrary caret motion. It's much easier to just put my hand on the mouse and move the cursor and click where I want it to go.

So many good options here.

Vimium is the gateway drug to the fantastic qutebrowser (more integration and customisation, scripting, based on qtwebkit/engine).

I love these papers. I have been on a similar path on macOS.

Concerning Vimium, there is the Vimium C version that seems to be a bit faster.

On macOS there is a similar software (don’t remember its name) to use a Vimium like feature on your whole desktop.

Vimperator was even better, and allowed a very smooth operation of most Firefox without using the mouse. Sadly, it was killed by the transition to a new plugin API.

Vimium and other current options lead to quite some friction, as Firefox disables plugins on many scenarios, such as a new empty page.

Hence, you often find yourself in a situation where you have to think whether Vimium is active and you can use Vim-like shortcuts, or you need to fallback to the Firefox UI.