I became hooked by Opera in 2000.

Have you tried it ?

It seems a great deal easier than the configurations you describe.

I became hooked by Opera in 2000.

Have you tried it ?

It seems a great deal easier than the configurations you describe.

Thanks for the info. Yes, I love bookmark keywords. Especially with bookmarklets added to the mix. I thought I’d cover those in another post as this one was getting quite long and there seams to be a nice logical cut off between keyboard shortcuts that replace mouse actions and keyboard shortcuts that replace more general long action sequences. And I love lifehacker!

Just installed Fancy Numbered Tabs. It’s ace! Thank for that. I always liked the idea of using Ctrl+[1-9] to get to tabs but no use if you don’t know what number you want to get to. Love the way it reuses the close button too.

Thanks for the OS X tips. I’ll own one one of these days!

I feel your pain when it comes to auto-complete. Roboform is to intrusive and google autofill is crap.

Thanks for the info. Yes, I love bookmark keywords. Especially with bookmarklets added to the mix. I thought I’d cover those in another post as this one was getting quite long and there seams to be a nice logical cut off between keyboard shortcuts that replace mouse actions and keyboard shortcuts that replace more general long action sequences. And I love lifehacker!

Just installed Fancy Numbered Tabs. It’s ace! Thank for that. I always liked the idea of using Ctrl+[1-9] to get to tabs but no use if you don’t know what number you want to get to. Love the way it reuses the close button too.

Thanks for the OS X tips. I’ll own one one of these days!

I feel your pain when it comes to auto-complete. Roboform is to intrusive and google autofill is crap.

So for example for me, ‘bn’ takes me to BBC News, ‘cal’ to Google Calendar, ‘gr’ to Google Reader (which has numerous shortcuts of its own, press ? in it to see), ‘wc’ to the weather for Canterbury, ‘gu’ to the Guardian, ‘mg’ to Media Guardian’, ‘reg’ to The Register, ‘router’ to my ADSL modem’s config page etc.

Even cleverer is that it supports pattern matching – I have a generic BBC bookmark with a keyword of ‘b’ but a location of ‘http://www.bbc.co.uk/%s‘ – so you type ‘b iplayer’ and it goes to bbc.co.uk/iplayer, ‘b radio4′ for bbc.co.uk/radio4, and so on, for any BBC site.

More here: http://lifehacker.com/196779/hack-attack-firefox-and-the-art-of-keyword-bookmarking (lifehacker, if you’re not aware of the site, are obsessed with this soft of thing..)

- The ‘Googlepedia’ addon is nice – it splits the google search results in two and shows you the Wikipedia article for your search term on the right hand side.

- There’s also an addon called ‘Fancy numbered tabs’ – it numbers the tabs so you can use a keyboard shortcut to jump between them rather than having to keep moving left or right.

- ‘Nostalgy’ (for Thunderbird email users on Windows or Mac) – very quick way of moving messages between folders – press ‘S’ and type the first few letters of the folder and you get an autocomplete box, hit return and the message is moved there. It remembers the last folder you used, so if you press shift-S it moves the highlighted message to the same place.

Some Mac only things:
- OS X has a feature built in where if a program is missing a shortcut you’d find really useful, you can just add your own to *any* individual application – its actually built into the operating system.
- Macbooks also have a gesture thing for the trackpad – you can swipe with left/right with three fingers to go forward and back through the browsing history, there’s also a two fingered up/down motion which acts like scrolling (handy where you only have the trackpad, no mouse) – there’s similar addons for Firefox for any platform.
- Textexpander (brilliant OS plugin for typing commonly used text strings), there is similar software for windows but I can’t remember now what my favourite used to be.. What’s nice about Textexpander is you can configure which applications respond to which shortcuts, it’ll automatically insert things like the date or time, and you can set it to move the cursor to a position of your choosing within the inserted text once its finished.

I have plenty more where this came from if you ever want it – however the thing I’ve *never* found is a decent (i.e. (a) reliable; can cope with many different sites and (b) secure; stores credit card info safely) form auto-complete utility. It is incredibly irritating having to fill out the same details all the time, even when Firefox has remembered the fields and you can use the down arrow and find a previous answer. I feel I really ought to be able to do it with one or two keystrokes maximum..

So for example for me, ‘bn’ takes me to BBC News, ‘cal’ to Google Calendar, ‘gr’ to Google Reader (which has numerous shortcuts of its own, press ? in it to see), ‘wc’ to the weather for Canterbury, ‘gu’ to the Guardian, ‘mg’ to Media Guardian’, ‘reg’ to The Register, ‘router’ to my ADSL modem’s config page etc.

Even cleverer is that it supports pattern matching – I have a generic BBC bookmark with a keyword of ‘b’ but a location of ‘http://www.bbc.co.uk/%s‘ – so you type ‘b iplayer’ and it goes to bbc.co.uk/iplayer, ‘b radio4′ for bbc.co.uk/radio4, and so on, for any BBC site.

More here: http://lifehacker.com/196779/hack-attack-firefox-and-the-art-of-keyword-bookmarking (lifehacker, if you’re not aware of the site, are obsessed with this soft of thing..)

- The ‘Googlepedia’ addon is nice – it splits the google search results in two and shows you the Wikipedia article for your search term on the right hand side.

- There’s also an addon called ‘Fancy numbered tabs’ – it numbers the tabs so you can use a keyboard shortcut to jump between them rather than having to keep moving left or right.

- ‘Nostalgy’ (for Thunderbird email users on Windows or Mac) – very quick way of moving messages between folders – press ‘S’ and type the first few letters of the folder and you get an autocomplete box, hit return and the message is moved there. It remembers the last folder you used, so if you press shift-S it moves the highlighted message to the same place.

Some Mac only things:
- OS X has a feature built in where if a program is missing a shortcut you’d find really useful, you can just add your own to *any* individual application – its actually built into the operating system.
- Macbooks also have a gesture thing for the trackpad – you can swipe with left/right with three fingers to go forward and back through the browsing history, there’s also a two fingered up/down motion which acts like scrolling (handy where you only have the trackpad, no mouse) – there’s similar addons for Firefox for any platform.
- Textexpander (brilliant OS plugin for typing commonly used text strings), there is similar software for windows but I can’t remember now what my favourite used to be.. What’s nice about Textexpander is you can configure which applications respond to which shortcuts, it’ll automatically insert things like the date or time, and you can set it to move the cursor to a position of your choosing within the inserted text once its finished.

I have plenty more where this came from if you ever want it – however the thing I’ve *never* found is a decent (i.e. (a) reliable; can cope with many different sites and (b) secure; stores credit card info safely) form auto-complete utility. It is incredibly irritating having to fill out the same details all the time, even when Firefox has remembered the fields and you can use the down arrow and find a previous answer. I feel I really ought to be able to do it with one or two keystrokes maximum..