I knew that / (slash) activated the Quick Find in Firefox and its close relations, but I didn’t know that ' (apostrophe) activated a Quick Find (in links). That’s quite helpful when jumping through web admin interfaces where I know which links I want, I’m using the two-handed keyboard (not the one-hander) and prefer not to jump between keyboard and mouse.
I don’t see that on the menus anywhere, so how was I meant to find it without digging through the manuals? What other speed-up shortcuts are lurking in common applications? Is there something like Emacs‘s where-is function (c-h w) for Firefox that will tell you where to find something?
Gone are the days when we could study the menus and have a fairly good idea of what commands are available. Modern GUI’s present us with a bewildering array of icons (many of which have no obvious meanings), keyboard “shortcuts” (that are shortcuts of nothing), inexplicable double clicks (that are, again, shortcuts of nothing), and an unknown amount of other magic. Sad.
I like accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart=true, and accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly=true so I don’t even have to press ‘ to start nagivating by links. It’s an old Mozilla feature that they kept but removed all the UI for, IOW you’re not supposed to find it.
Shell-wise I love Ctrl-R to search previous commands, and Alt-. to insert the last argument of the previous command. I recently discovered you can prefix that with Alt-number to get the n-th last argument.
Have a look at http://www.vimperator.org/ to make firefox finally usable.
You use emacs?
Try conkeror: http://conkeror.org/
I bet you will like it 😉
Ctrl+K to jump the cursor into the search bar, selecting any/all existing text in the process, is one I only learned of a few months ago(and Ctrl+L to jump into the location bar too).
I also learned a bit earlier than I did about Ctrl+K, about how the Linux version of Firefox recognizes X’s selection buffer. Select the text of a URL and just middle click inside the page display area to go to that address. Text (ie: non-link) URLS that span multiple lines? Just select em and middle click, none of this select the first line and paste into the location bar before selecting the next line and appending it to the previous in the location bar. Just select and middle click!
Using apostrophe to search for links is in this list of shortcuts I found after first learning about Ctrl+K/L – it shouldn’t be news to me but I suppose I didn’t read it very thoroughly.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts
I’ve got conkeror on one machine. It’s OK, but I think it lacked the middle-click URL pasting that Geoff describes and it was fiddly to copy the current page URL, so I don’t use it everywhere.
Good tip, thanks for sharing!