Mouseless Firefox

I'm a big fan of operating my computer using the keyboard (as opposed to the mouse).

The advantages include:

• I can type without looking at what I'm typing.
• I have to type a lot anyway, so time spent moving my hand from my keyboard to my mouse and back is time spent, well, moving my hand.
• I put my keyboard in my lap and let the arms of my office chair support my elbows to reduce strain on my wrists. I have not found any similarly-comfortable way to arrange my mouse.

Unix used to be very keyboard-friendly. Now that so much of what we do on the computer is graphical, Windows' integrated OS and graphical toolkits generally put the X-gnome-gtk mishmash to shame in terms of consistent keyboard navigability. Emacs remains a paragon of super-efficient keyboard navigability [I just pressed alt-slash to autocomplete the word "navigability". There. I did it again. :)], but many of the other programs I use on a day-to-day basis require me to reach for the mouse. The worst offenders are firefox and thunderbird.

Once upon a time, I thought the best way to deal with this problem was to read mail and browse the web from emacs. Unfortunately, w3, w3m, and gnus, while having some serious strengths are just too slow, unable to display graphics, and difficult to configure. So I'm stuck with firefox and thunderbird which, despite their lack of obvious shortcuts, boast thousands of developers who make them the leading networking applications of our time.

If you want to learn how to save some miles on your mouse while browsing the web, first go read Adam Pash's Mouse-less Firefox article and the thunderbird keyboard shortcuts page.

That's a nice start. But there are still a lot of common tasks for which I've found no reasonable keyboard shortcuts. Here's my wishlist. I'll post solutions as I find (or create) them.

• (delicious) bookmarklet shortcut: Write a firefox keyword that takes the url of the current page as an argument? Use the delicious firefox extension?
• "search for button" shortcut (like using "'" to search for a link)
• emacs keyboard shortcuts in textareas: Perhaps mozex together with emacs can fulfill this wish and more.
• copy url of current page to X clipboard
• deselect url bar (after pressing ctrl-L): Shift-tab almost works, but it jumps to the bottom of the page.
• thunderbird: move currently-selected-message to my "Done" folder
• display page history and allow me to navigate forward or back more than one page at a time

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