TouchCursor

As well as affecting my productivity in the expected way — more efficient and comfortable typing and editing — TouchCursor seems to have tipped a balance for me towards using the keyboard instead of the mouse wherever possible.

The first piece of mouse-driven interface I discarded was the Windows Start Menu, thanks to the excellent Launchy, which lets you launch programs and open folders and URLs with the keyboard. The thing I like about Launchy is that it requires no setup — By default it scans your start menu folders, desktop and bookmarks, and the command that you type to launch a program or bookmark is simply a portion of it’s name. If you want to customise the behaviour, you can, by adding folders to scan and file types to scan for.

After using both Firefox and Explorer in parallel for a while on my different PCs, the Firefox apostrophe key (incremental search in hyperlinks) got me off the fence. It doesn’t completely eliminate the need for a mouse, nor is it always the best way of navigating, but there are situations where it can enable completely mouse-free browsing.

An example of the synergy of these tools is looking up some function documentation when I’m coding: For instance, to look up OpenGL’s glViewport function on the web, without reaching for the mouse, or even for the cursor keys, I can open a browser bookmark with Launchy (Alt+Space, “opengl”, Enter), go straight to the function I’m looking for, even though the required hyperlink is way off the bottom of the screen (apostrophe, “glvi”, Enter) and scroll up and down the page (or correct any typos in the search terms) with TouchCursor. Then it’s back to the code with Alt+Tab. Nice.