What browsers have good keyboard support? That means you don't have to use the mouse so much. Or what is a good setup for browser + keyboard interaction.
I know the basic keyboard shortcuts (tab switching, new tabs etc.) but I don't know a good way to switch between links and search areas - usually that means TAB, Shift-TAB one at a time.
Is there maybe some plugin that'll add numbers to links and I could just do something like 12 to go to the link 12?
Firefox with Vimperator is designed to never, ever need the mouse.
Ever. And it works really quite well. Based upon the cli text editor Vim, so it's certainly got the right idea :)
Just an example:
Out of the box Opera supports all-keyboard operation on a page.
The most important is probably navigating links. Just use Shift and the arrow keys:
Shift + ArrowUp: go to a link above the current link.
Shift + ArrowDown: go to a link below the current link.
Shift + ArrowLeft: go to a link to the left of the current link.
Shift + ArrowRight: go to a link to the right of the current link.
These work the same in Opera 9.x and 10.x. In Debilski's link, Keyboard shortcuts, they are listed near "Spatial navigation keys".
UZBL is a browser made for exactly this. It's extremely configurable, fast, and you should never feel the need to use your mouse.
It's based on WebKit, so it's fast and supports all the sites that the other WebKit-based browsers does (Chrome, Safari, etc.).
It might have a longer learning curve than for example Firefox with Vimperator, or similar but I believe it would be worth it.
Uzbl follows the Unix philosophy - "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
Surfingkeys is another chrome extension that provides chrome a much better keyboard supports, including
Surfingkeys -- expand your browser with javascript and keyboard
And you can even write you own javascript function for key mapping, as below
mapkey('c-y', 'Show me the money', function() {
alert('a well-known phrase uttered by characters in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire');
});
Besides that, surfingkeys has some other very useful features like
u to show help
f to follow links
b to browser/search bookmark
v to toggle visual mode
/ to find in current page
space to switch tab
Firefox can be setup such that the first few letters in a link can be typed and the focus will then move there. If the few letters are not unique then F3 (or Ctrl + G) can be used to jump between the matching links. The link with focus can then opened with Enter (or if it is to be opened in a new tab: Shift + Ctrl + Enter).
You can also get close to a link by typing (e.g. to a unique link text) and then use TAB to get to the desired link.
How to setup Firefox to make this practical can be found in this question, Update 1.
