Speed Mousing in Firefox

After reading an excellent article on lifehacker about speed browsing with Firefox bookmark keywords, I thought I'd share a few tips on one of my favourite Firefox Extension - the All-in-one Mouse Gestures Extension. I wanted to add a comment on the lifehacker article but apparently you have to be invited. :( If anyone's feeling generous an invite would be much appreciated!

Whilst I'm not overly fond of the mouse and generally use keyboard shortcuts for just about anything that uses a keyboard shortcut, there are often times when your hand ends up resting on the mouse anyway. On those occasions it's actually quicker using mouse gestures to perform actions in Firefox than hitting the keyboard shortcuts.

The idea is that after installing the All-in-one Mouse Gestures Extension, you can right-click and drag the mouse to draw shapes or 'make gestures' on the Firefox browser window. Each shape is assigned an individual task or action such that when you release the right mouse button, the action or task is performed for you. The gesture you perform is highlighted in red on the Firefox window whilst you're holding the right mouse button down.

At first I thought it sounded somewhat bizarre, but I must admit. In all honesty though it's one extension I really can't do without in Firefox having used it for a couple of years at least. I often move from Firefox into Windows Explorer and carry on using the mouse gestures in Explorer expecting them to work... doh.

The two main gestures I find the most useful are simple single strokes:

• a horizontal line from a right to left takes me back one page in the browser history
  
• a vertical line in the up direction takes me up one directory in the current website's directory hierarchy - up to the parent directory. For example if you're at the URL http://example.com/folder1/folder2/, performing the 'up' gesture takes you up to http://example.com/folder1/. If you're already at the top level/site root folder, the gesture takes you up to the parent domain - ie if you're at http://freebsd.munk.me.uk/, the gesture takes you up to http://munk.me.uk/.

The bonus of these gestures is you can perform them *very* rapidly, probably more rapidly than hitting 'alt-backspace' to perform the keyboard equivalent of the horizontal line gesture above. However there's no equivalent to the 'up a directory' gesture in keyboard shortcuts as far as I know, would be nice if there was.

Another excellent feature I use a lot is the ability to map gestures to the mouse scroll wheel. By right clicking and scrolling the mouse simultaneously, the browser history list is brought up and you can scroll through the list of previous pages you visited. Releasing the mouse button takes you to the page you have highlighted.

Along with the two gestures above, for me this makes the all-in-one mouse gestures extension at least as powerful as the keyword shortcut feature in Firefox - although I must admit I find the keyword hacking probably more revolutionary in terms of making content more available to users more quickly. I like the idea of the GUI based web browser taking on more of a 'command-line' feel where you enter a command (the bookmark keyword) followed by the command argument (the text string you want the bookmarked keyword to act upon). I don't know if the ability to enter more than one 'argument' to a keyword would give any additional flexibility or just make things confusing... could be interesting.

On the subject of using keywords in Firefox to create easy to use searches in the address bar - I'm actually addicted to the 'alt-d' keystroke to put the cursor in the address bar and can't get used to 'ctrl-l' at all - there's another great extension that allows you to extend the usability of Firefox along the lines of better searching - Conquery.

Conquery allows you to highlight text within a document being displayed in the browser, and then select a custom query to perform on that highlighted text. The simplest version of this might be where you highlight some text that you want more information on, right-click, then select the search engine you want to run the search on from the conquery context menu. I think that functionality is already in Firefox by default, just a simple example though.

The main way I usually use it is to add torrents to my web based torrent client torrentflux - by right clicking on a torrent download link, I select the torrentflux entry from the conquery menu and the torrent is automatically uploaded to the server. This works just the same way as a bookmark keyword query and the conquery recipe for torrentflux was probably taken directly from my bookmark keyword :)


To end off, here are some of the keywords I use in my bookmarks.

In this list the bookmark keyword points to the bookmark URL. To test them, drag and drop the link to a bookmark, create the keyword and follow the example instructions. Anyone reading this far probably knows this already anyway :o

a -> http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/external-search/002-3100725-4260029?field-keywords=%s&index=blended&tag=edazzlenet-20
- this one I use in the address bar along the lines of 'a dj shadow' to search for 'dj shadow' stuff on amazon.co.uk

am -> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/core.html#%s
- 'am virtualhost' in the address bar takes me to the apache manual page for the 'virtualhost' httpd.conf directive.

ebay -> http://search.ebay.co.uk//search/search.dll?from=R40&satitle=%s
- this one can be used like 'ebay foobar widget' to search for a foobar widget on ebay!

toolhaus -> http://toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs?User=%s&Dirn=Received+by
- this is an excellent one for ebayers - type in 'toolhaus jezhanco' and you get the skinny on what kind of negative feedback the user 'jezhanco' gets on ebay.

bbc -> http://www.bbc.co.uk/%s
- I use the BBC website quite a lot so this one comes in handy. It basically saves me typing 'bbc.co.uk' out in full - to goto 'http://bbc.co.uk/radio1' I just type in 'bbc radio1'.

tfu -> http://torrentflux.munk.me.uk/index.php?url_upload=%s
- this is a very useful one for me, tfu stands for 'torrentflux upload' and it lets me upload a torrent file to my server directly from the server it's available for download on. Right-click on torrent link, copy link location, hit alt-d, type in 'tfu ctrl-v' to paste in the link and bang, torrent uploaded direct to the server.

d -> http://del.icio.us/tag/%s
- easy search for tags on del.iciou.us.

abuse -> http://openrbl.org/dnsbl?i=%s&t=s&odddWH=xceX9220&j=1
- check openrbl for an IP addresses abuse listing 'abuse 213.152.51.194' etc.

fp -> http://www.freshports.org/%s
- check the freebsd ports site freshports.org for latest info on ports - ie 'fp www/apache13' for info on apache 1.3.

imdb -> http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s
- another one I use very frequently. Search for info on The Godfather movie by typing in 'imdb the godfather'. No idea why I don't shorten this to just 'i', I certainly use it enough :)

php -> http://php.net/%s
- this one is very useful as well for PHP scripting reference. Type in 'php include' to get detailed info and examples on the usage of the PHP include() function from the PHP manual.

g -> http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s
- without doubt the most used keyword of all - search for 'foobar' on google by typing in 'g foobar'. I think this keyword is even in the default bookmarks for Firefox isn't it?

dict -> http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s
- search for the correct spelling of the word permanant using 'dict permanant'.

ep -> http://epguides.com/%s/
- find information about the TV show 'scrubs' by typing in 'ep scrubs'

wayback -> http://web.archive.org/web/*/%s
- another excellent keyword shortcut IMO. The wayback archive at archive.org allows you to view the state of a website as it appeared in the past - effectively 'timewarping' you back to the way a site looked days, months or years ago. Very useful if a site recently expired like munk.me.uk did yesterday!. Use the keyword as 'wayback munk.me.uk' to view munk.me.uk as it looked in the past.


Well, that's all the shortcuts I think people might be interested in. There are in total 41 shortcuts I have, didn't bother pasting them all because some are pretty mundane (ok some of the above are probably a bit mundane to most folk to but w/e :o). Hopefully it gives someone an idea about getting stuff done quicker in Firefox.

Happy browsing!