ShortCat uses the accessibility API to put Vimium-style keyboard links on buttons and text fields in any app.
I find that Vimium works faster in Firefox than using ShortCat to click around websites, so I use both, but ShortCat technically should do everything (clicking-wise) that Vimium does.
I wonder if it has to do with accessibility API thread locking. I found a different extension I used to emulate an i3 style environment suffered when I used the Unity game engine. It ended up being limitations of the accessibility API.
This delay is configurable. The delay is there so you can actually type a bit before the UI pops up, and then the UI will be filtered to just your selection.
As I understand it, a payment system is in the works. I would gladly fork over some cash to support ShortCat. Looks like someone recommended Homerow, which appears to be pretty comparable to ShortCat, and it has a one-time purchase option.
Ha! I actually switched from Vimium to Tridactyl partly because I prefer the rough, snappy scrolling. It felt much more like the ctrl+d ctrl+u navigation in VIM.
I never started with Vimium (was using an even less known one), also in part because I find smooth scrolling disorienting. Also on Tridactyl now, once someone on here showed me the hintfiltermode, hintchars, and hintnames settings to get the old Vimperator behavior (which I also find so much better than any current defaults):
set hintfiltermode vimperator-reflow
set hintchars 1234567890
set hintnames numeric
Lets you type the words in links, and the hints filter down to only matches. If you go all the way to 1 match it automatically picks it, but as the hints filter down the numeric labels also reset - so there are no gaps betweeen the numbers and it's almost always between 1 and 5 to get the link I want.
I would typically do something like this - I'd press "/", search for an occurence, it navigates to one, if it's a link, pressing "go" - opens it in a new tab, "gb" - opens it without switching to it. I promise you, you'd love this.
i use i3wm so there are various keybindings you can use.
for mouseless stuff i use xdotool to move the pointer in 16 or 64 pixel increments using the keyboard.
if i could toggle the mouse pointer on and off i would.
Incidentally, I've been trying to use the keyboard to scroll webpages recently, and it's a disaster. Nobody does it, apparently.
PageUp/PageDown do not work correctly on sites that have a permanent topbar (some of the content is never shown). Cursor up/down often does something unexpected (for example in Mastodon, if you use PageDown several times and then cursor down, you will get yanked back).
I think it is a sad regression. Not everybody is able to use the mouse and its scrollwheel!
I use Space/Shift+Space and PageUp/PageDown and End¹ for vertical scrolling all the time. It’s nowhere near a disaster. I also disable JS by default, which… well, actually that might help sometimes. And hinder other times.
Rarely, I find a page that doesn’t use the document scroll area, but makes its own which is not focused, and so you have to focus that (by Tab as many times as necessary, or by clicking) before you can scroll by keyboard. But that’s rare.
Long ago, Firefox started compensating for sticky headers, reducing the amount it would scroll the page by, and it mostly works well, though it’s not flawless. I don’t think I’ve observed the same feature in other browsers. One amusing situation that can arise is when the header disappears when you go down and reappears when you go up, so that repeating PageUp and PageDown yields net movement in one direction.
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¹ End, but not Home, which is Fn+Left on my laptop, but the Left key hasn’t worked for over a year now. I’ve contemplated replacing the battery and keyboard, but the laptop’s falling apart in enough other ways it doesn’t quite feel worth the investment…
Mapping mouse events to key shortcuts might be the only way forward that could realistically work. Something like moving the mouse where the cursor/selection is, and sending scrolling events from there.
The lenovo keyboard with its trackpoint and mouse buttons is a kind of solution to this, but IME scrolling is still a PITA as it needs two inputs (switching to scroll mode while moving the trackpoint)
I used to use vimium (and tried similar extensions) but it always scared me how big the codebase was for most of the popular extensions. In the end I came up with a tiny extension for just the things I need https://github.com/h43z/jkscroll
When you press Enter in the search box, Firefox finds the next occurrence of your search pattern. An easy fix that doesn't require an extension is to press Esc first, which closes the search box, and then you can press Enter.
I was going to disagree with you, but… huh. It doesn’t work on buttons. Thought it did. Selection is set, but focus isn’t. Further workaround: Shift+Tab.
This feels like it may be a bug, but at the very least it’s not a recent regression—I tested Firefox 44 and it shows the same behaviour. (44.0 is the oldest version I can run now, apparently. I tried 4.0 first, the first version with linux-x86_64 builds, which I have run successfully in the past, I think even in the last year, but now all versions before 44.0 are crashing on startup.)
It may be well-known, but I’m quite happy with Vimium C for keyboard-based browsing. It provides a sufficiently good set of Vim keybindings* and highlights all clickable elements when you press 'f', not just <a href> ones.
For people using keyboard a lot, and who HATE to have focus going out of the HTML rendering panel, you can simply Ctrl-F Esc and you are back on focus. Best hint I read on the Internet since 1967 !
I’ve always found Firefox’s / quick find feature incredibly useful. But having to click on a link after selecting it always felt awkward and interrupted my flow. This little tweak is brilliant because it removes that extra step with just a few lines of code. If browsers allowed links to activate automatically once selected, navigating with a keyboard would feel so much smoother. I sincerely hope that becomes a standard feature one day.
I'm using Firefox and the links were activated when I hit enter in the quick-find prompt. Not sure why the behavior is different than what the author is seeing.
The issue is with any JavaScript driven on click events tags. Some sites even have their <a> tags not responding to keyboards events, because they have a hash href, and a JavaScript handler to redirect.
FWIW, using Chromium on Linux, I was able to use Ctrl+F + Escape + Enter to find and click on all of them except for the "span with an onclick handler".
I think browsers should also come with headingMaps [0] and landmarks by default for all websites. With a keyboard shortcut to access them, navigation would be great (assuming websites have a semantic DOM).
Just chiming in with recommendation of yet another hints extension, this one is called »Yet Another Hints Extension (YAHE)« and is really minimal and nice.
Signed, happy long-time user.
yeah seriously wth, I just did powercfg /requests and it says an audio stream is in use... so many web apps open I wonder how much power its been eating.
Honestly, most sites these days built in such incompetent way I cannot imagine how much disabled users suffer...
Since there is no tariff adding <div> in react code, even my teammates are using these as pseudo buttons. As a user, I cannot even tell if it's a button or not. The cursor usually doesn't change or becomes "I-beam" (text selection). Only way to understand is click random places and wait for mysterious stuff to happen.
Pressing down-arrow on WSJ articles unmutes the auto-playing video. This may have happened by mistake, but surely they've kept it this way on purpose. I hate it.
Mouseless as well for navigating anywhere on the computer without a mouse -> https://mouseless.click/
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