Hi CINJUG members,
I'm new to CINJUG -- just attended my first meeting. Neal Ford
presented some great ideas about optimizing productivity. Being an
enthusiast of avoiding the mouse and inefficient interfaces, I have a
few additional ideas I'd like to share with the group:
- Happy Hacking Keyboard. This is a tiny keyboard that frees real
estate on your desk, but more importantly, allows for extremely
efficient navigation. After trying it, I never want to go back to a
standard keyboard -- your hands never have to leave the home row, even
for F[1-12], arrow movement, page up/down, etc. More significant than
it sounds! Here's a good place to buy it at a reasonable price:
http://linuxcentral.com/catalog/?prod_code=K000-012&id=C1CIyEFXmFwCW
- Screen. This tool, running with bash, is my all-time favorite.
It's a "terminal multiplexer" -- allows you to have N "screens"
running in a text-mode terminal and lets you control them with
keystrokes, scroll up/down, copy-paste between them, split views, and
much more. It even lets you detach a session, leaving all your
programs running so you can come back and reattach at any time, even
after logging out and logging back in. I use screen in Linux, but you
can get it for Cygwin as well (though it may not be available through
the Cygwin installer...google it). Here's some additional info:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/34
http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Using_screen
- Firefox has tons of great keyboard browsing features (my favorite is
the find-as-you-type-link feature and the open-link-in-new-tab
feature; single quote and control-enter on highlighted link,
respectively): https://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard
- In Windows, a utility called AltDesk can be useful. It is a fairly
simple app that provides virtual windows, keystrokes, and autorun
capability (launch different programs in virtual desktops at startup).
- gmail. Turn on the keystroke options.
- wmii3 window manager for Linux users. Completely designed around
minimalism and to let you abandon the mouse. It allows you to manage
your own windows, the way you demand. Scriptable via Ruby. There are
other similar projects, but I suggest wmii3.
http://wmii.de/index.php?page=guide
http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/aFewWmii3Hacks.html
I hope these ideas will be useful!
Karl
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