After years of xmonad, now sway (with swaymonad which lacks some features), PaperWM looks appealing.
Personally, the most important feature for me is being able to switch to a specific window (workspace) with a shortcut without delay/animation and guaranteed no floating stuff in the way.
Anybody that comes from a “traditional” tiling WM has made the switch to PaperWM wants to share their experience? It looks like one can configure such shortcuts to switch to a number out of a fixed workspace list, and then in each workspace you could have one window, or several.
I use PaperWM on my work Ubuntu and it’s pretty decent as far as tiling WMs go. You can customize a lot. I have noticed that it can sometimes crash or freeze (and subsequently cause a restart of the gnome shell) if you do anything related to screen sharing or external monitors.
For reference - on my personal I use Hyprland (but have used pop-shell and i3 before that).
There is also Niri now if you want a full-fledged WM (and not just a gnome extension) that uses this scrolling mechanism.
These are OK-ish, but they both only work for links that have text in them. They can be a nice speedup in some cases but they can’t replace the mouse altogether.
I see the difference now, thanks. I’ve tried this kind of extension before, and one issue I had was that i had to press the shortcut, wait for the popups on the screen, and then type the letter(s) in the popup. In contrast, with the built-in ones, I can start typing without having to wait.
Came in to post this. It works well for my purposes, but as pointed in other replies, limited.
I love my PaperWM, like the OP mentions. (Actually, precisely today I was able to switch my work computer from Windows to Linux and now I have PaperWM everywhere.)
BTW, apparently, this is how blind users roll. If it doesn’t work well with keyboard navigation, likely it sucks for blind users. (But of course, good keyboard navigation does not imply good accessibility for the blind.)
I’ve had good luck with https://www.qutebrowser.org/ although it might be a bit minimal for some. Definitely doesn’t have all the FF features. Its default bindings are somewhat vim-like, but you can rebind.
Yeah, QuteBrowser out of the box seems better than Firefox, but last I checked it doesn’t have uBlock Origin, so the overall experience was a pretty significant step back for me. Maybe if LibreWolf goes down the tubes I’ll give it another look.
Use the right tool for the job. If you need to point to something on the screen, consider using the pointing device, not the character input device. If a $20 logitech mouse gives you wrist pain, try something else – I got great relief by switching to a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball.
Why do we fetishize the hardware Dennis Ritchie used in 1975 (a text terminal) instead of what he used in 1985 (a graphical terminal with a mouse)?
Well, from my POV, I don’t want to point to something on the screen. I want to activate it, to use it. It just so happens that for many people, pointing is easier and is the default method. Not for me. I spend 80-90% of my time typing text anyway, and moving my hand to a mouse for a quick action breaks the flow.
I don’t know about you, specifically, but I see a lot of people putting a lot of effort into never touching the mouse, and then when they need to do something simple like copying a sentence from the middle of a paragraph in Emacs, and they’re typing C-s to search to the start of the sentence, then M-SPC to start marking, then M-f again and again and again to select the whole sentence… and that’s assuming efficient emacs use, rather than the equally common “hold down C-n and C-f until we get to the right place”. Is that effective when just moving your hand 3 inches to the right gives you a device perfectly suited to specifying “I want everything from HERE… to HERE” (and then you hit M-w with your left hand which has remained on the keyboard)
Yeah, sure, there are probably more effective ways to accomplish the thing I mentioned just above, but in actual day to day use? I don’t see people doing it, I just see them mashing keys (but MAN you feel like you got a lot accomplished after hitting that many keys)
I use both keyboard and mouse for selections in my text editor (which is not emacs!) and it’s nice to have both options. Often, one’s more convenient than the other. Mouse selection is not always optimal.
Having to mouse through a menu is almost always slower than a two or three key chord. It’s nice to have both options: I don’t want be forced to memorize every single menu command’s shortcut, but I also don’t want to be forced to use the menus for common operations.
Window management and web browsing… same deal! It’s just that, historically, mainstream GUIs don’t always provide very usable keyboard methods for these tasks. Having them available increases your options. It’s hard to know what’s the best tool for the job if you’re stuck with only one tool.
Some tasks, like drawing, are not a good fit for the keyboard. But as a programmer, most of what I do at work is, and it’s nice to have the option.
Would quibble over “3 inches to the right”¹, but I agree with your point. I have dropped all pretense of movement efficiency² to justify my obstinate efforts keeping to the keyboard; instead I invoke… not sure; comfort? laziness?
It’s weird because “WASD + mouse”³ was my “native” hand placement, but one decade away from FPSs and readline has ossified my fingers to the home row. Finding out about ' in Firefox was a breath of fresh air - yes, typing out link text is clunky; no, I cannot reach text-less buttons; but the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep my arm still are becoming inane.
I think you also hit on something with your last point - I do find it more fun to type my way out of problems. I’m not good at it (no better than I could become if I reconciled with my mouse) but the type-messup-fixup loop feels more engaging when I don’t have to switch input devices during the process. Will not pretend results are achieved faster though.
¹ Measuring tape says it’s more like 12 inches from j to the left edge of the mouse. TBH though (a) when actually using the rodent, I tend to leave it closer, below the keyboard, where a touchpad would be (b) getting zero mileage out of the rightmost third of the keyboard; been meaning to try compact layouts for a while, which would reduce the distance.
² Just like my compulsive use of C-[_ght] means I must drop all pretense of “typing efficiency”.
Article author here. I do use the right tool for the job - as I said in the article, I wanted to maximize my keyboard use without going overboard. I do, in fact, have an ergonomic mouse that has helped greatly - it’s an Anker vertical mouse, not super-expensive, and works just fine.
The fact is that most of my work involves writing / typing. I find it less disruptive to switch to the mouse less. But I still use the mouse plenty when it’s the right tool for the job.
Where’s eye-tracking at? I saw a demo video of sadly-now-abandoned app called Talon Voice which appeared to show great eye-tracking capabilities. That would get rid of a lot of my mouse needs!
Is there a way to make the native dialog boxes (typically an OK / Cancel sort of thing) keyboardable? That’s always what drove me nuts about MacOS. Just give me tab select and enter to trigger! I don’t understand why they’ve never adopted that.
There is an accessibility toggle somewhere that makes them (mostly) keyboard accessible. I can’t remember where it is exactly, but knowing that it exists is half the battle! ;)
I was excited to try this out, but discovered that it prevents the space bar from working in kitty. I’m sure there is a way to fix that, but I wanted to leave a note here in case anyone else might try this out and then a hour later wonder why their space bar isn’t working in their terminal.
You can click the little ( i ) icon in the top right and change some of the bindings. I switched “activate” from space bar to what Apple’s always called “Return” (although I thought The Mac is not a Typewriter).
But I ended up turning it all off anyway, because the UX was so terrible and got in the way of everything. I only wanted keys for standard buttons on standard dialog boxes! I wish you better luck than I.
The problem isn’t (just) the desktop environment, it’s also the apps you’re running. This was why Jef Raskin’s designs, for example, were so radical. You couldn’t graft a new WM into old programs; you’ll still have various sharp edges where the paradigms collide.
After years of xmonad, now sway (with swaymonad which lacks some features), PaperWM looks appealing.
Personally, the most important feature for me is being able to switch to a specific window (workspace) with a shortcut without delay/animation and guaranteed no floating stuff in the way.
Anybody that comes from a “traditional” tiling WM has made the switch to PaperWM wants to share their experience? It looks like one can configure such shortcuts to switch to a number out of a fixed workspace list, and then in each workspace you could have one window, or several.
I use PaperWM on my work Ubuntu and it’s pretty decent as far as tiling WMs go. You can customize a lot. I have noticed that it can sometimes crash or freeze (and subsequently cause a restart of the gnome shell) if you do anything related to screen sharing or external monitors.
For reference - on my personal I use Hyprland (but have used pop-shell and i3 before that).
There is also Niri now if you want a full-fledged WM (and not just a gnome extension) that uses this scrolling mechanism.
I recently (~1 week ago) switched to Niri. I think I like it so far, but there are a few minor annoyances I’m writing up:
However, I am consistently getting two more hours of battery life compared to Sway so that’s incredible.
If you want to go mouseless in Firefox but aren’t a vim user, Surfingkeys is quite good: https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys/
Firefox has two of these out of the box:
/for “quick find” and'(single quote) for find a link (when you hit enter it navigates to the link found).These are OK-ish, but they both only work for links that have text in them. They can be a nice speedup in some cases but they can’t replace the mouse altogether.
I see the difference now, thanks. I’ve tried this kind of extension before, and one issue I had was that i had to press the shortcut, wait for the popups on the screen, and then type the letter(s) in the popup. In contrast, with the built-in ones, I can start typing without having to wait.
Came in to post this. It works well for my purposes, but as pointed in other replies, limited.
I love my PaperWM, like the OP mentions. (Actually, precisely today I was able to switch my work computer from Windows to Linux and now I have PaperWM everywhere.)
BTW, apparently, this is how blind users roll. If it doesn’t work well with keyboard navigation, likely it sucks for blind users. (But of course, good keyboard navigation does not imply good accessibility for the blind.)
I’ve had good luck with https://www.qutebrowser.org/ although it might be a bit minimal for some. Definitely doesn’t have all the FF features. Its default bindings are somewhat vim-like, but you can rebind.
Yeah, QuteBrowser out of the box seems better than Firefox, but last I checked it doesn’t have uBlock Origin, so the overall experience was a pretty significant step back for me. Maybe if LibreWolf goes down the tubes I’ll give it another look.
Since v2.0 it has a built-in adblock, which has been good enough for me. See Q8 in the FAQ
Thanks for the link! Surprised I hadn’t heard of this extension before. This seems like a more extensible vimium? Any downsides?
Use the right tool for the job. If you need to point to something on the screen, consider using the pointing device, not the character input device. If a $20 logitech mouse gives you wrist pain, try something else – I got great relief by switching to a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball.
Why do we fetishize the hardware Dennis Ritchie used in 1975 (a text terminal) instead of what he used in 1985 (a graphical terminal with a mouse)?
Well, from my POV, I don’t want to point to something on the screen. I want to activate it, to use it. It just so happens that for many people, pointing is easier and is the default method. Not for me. I spend 80-90% of my time typing text anyway, and moving my hand to a mouse for a quick action breaks the flow.
I don’t know about you, specifically, but I see a lot of people putting a lot of effort into never touching the mouse, and then when they need to do something simple like copying a sentence from the middle of a paragraph in Emacs, and they’re typing C-s to search to the start of the sentence, then M-SPC to start marking, then M-f again and again and again to select the whole sentence… and that’s assuming efficient emacs use, rather than the equally common “hold down C-n and C-f until we get to the right place”. Is that effective when just moving your hand 3 inches to the right gives you a device perfectly suited to specifying “I want everything from HERE… to HERE” (and then you hit M-w with your left hand which has remained on the keyboard)
Yeah, sure, there are probably more effective ways to accomplish the thing I mentioned just above, but in actual day to day use? I don’t see people doing it, I just see them mashing keys (but MAN you feel like you got a lot accomplished after hitting that many keys)
I use both keyboard and mouse for selections in my text editor (which is not emacs!) and it’s nice to have both options. Often, one’s more convenient than the other. Mouse selection is not always optimal.
Having to mouse through a menu is almost always slower than a two or three key chord. It’s nice to have both options: I don’t want be forced to memorize every single menu command’s shortcut, but I also don’t want to be forced to use the menus for common operations.
Window management and web browsing… same deal! It’s just that, historically, mainstream GUIs don’t always provide very usable keyboard methods for these tasks. Having them available increases your options. It’s hard to know what’s the best tool for the job if you’re stuck with only one tool.
Some tasks, like drawing, are not a good fit for the keyboard. But as a programmer, most of what I do at work is, and it’s nice to have the option.
That’s highly inefficient Emacs use, btw. Instead: M-a goes to the start of the sentence, and M-e goes to the end of a sentence.
Using M-w is also inefficient mouse usage in Emacs: mouse-3 will copy the selection, no need to switch back to the keyboard.
Would quibble over “3 inches to the right”¹, but I agree with your point. I have dropped all pretense of movement efficiency² to justify my obstinate efforts keeping to the keyboard; instead I invoke… not sure; comfort? laziness?
It’s weird because “WASD + mouse”³ was my “native” hand placement, but one decade away from FPSs and readline has ossified my fingers to the home row. Finding out about
'in Firefox was a breath of fresh air - yes, typing out link text is clunky; no, I cannot reach text-less buttons; but the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep my arm still are becoming inane.I think you also hit on something with your last point - I do find it more fun to type my way out of problems. I’m not good at it (no better than I could become if I reconciled with my mouse) but the type-messup-fixup loop feels more engaging when I don’t have to switch input devices during the process. Will not pretend results are achieved faster though.
¹ Measuring tape says it’s more like 12 inches from
jto the left edge of the mouse. TBH though (a) when actually using the rodent, I tend to leave it closer, below the keyboard, where a touchpad would be (b) getting zero mileage out of the rightmost third of the keyboard; been meaning to try compact layouts for a while, which would reduce the distance.² Just like my compulsive use of
C-[_ght]means I must drop all pretense of “typing efficiency”.³ Technically “ZQSD” 🐓
Article author here. I do use the right tool for the job - as I said in the article, I wanted to maximize my keyboard use without going overboard. I do, in fact, have an ergonomic mouse that has helped greatly - it’s an Anker vertical mouse, not super-expensive, and works just fine.
The fact is that most of my work involves writing / typing. I find it less disruptive to switch to the mouse less. But I still use the mouse plenty when it’s the right tool for the job.
Where’s eye-tracking at? I saw a demo video of sadly-now-abandoned app called Talon Voice which appeared to show great eye-tracking capabilities. That would get rid of a lot of my mouse needs!
In the past year, I have moved to nearly-entirely mouseless macOS.
Is there a way to make the native dialog boxes (typically an OK / Cancel sort of thing) keyboardable? That’s always what drove me nuts about MacOS. Just give me tab select and enter to trigger! I don’t understand why they’ve never adopted that.
My Mac experience doesn’t extend past Mac OS X, but that has/had Enter for OK and I think Space for Cancel. Do those no longer work?
There is an accessibility toggle somewhere that makes them (mostly) keyboard accessible. I can’t remember where it is exactly, but knowing that it exists is half the battle! ;)
Found it! System Settings -> Accessibility -> Keyboard -> Full Keyboard Access
Thank you, this is great. It’s even surprisingly configurable.
Always the first thing I go turn on on new macs!
Yes, this is huge. Forgot it above as I’ve been doing it long before any of those other tools (except maybe LaunchBar, since 2003 probably).
I was excited to try this out, but discovered that it prevents the space bar from working in kitty. I’m sure there is a way to fix that, but I wanted to leave a note here in case anyone else might try this out and then a hour later wonder why their space bar isn’t working in their terminal.
You can click the little ( i ) icon in the top right and change some of the bindings. I switched “activate” from space bar to what Apple’s always called “Return” (although I thought The Mac is not a Typewriter).
But I ended up turning it all off anyway, because the UX was so terrible and got in the way of everything. I only wanted keys for standard buttons on standard dialog boxes! I wish you better luck than I.
I absolutely love PaperWM. It took me a bit to learn, but with only maybe five important shortcuts, it instantly became my daily driver.
The problem isn’t (just) the desktop environment, it’s also the apps you’re running. This was why Jef Raskin’s designs, for example, were so radical. You couldn’t graft a new WM into old programs; you’ll still have various sharp edges where the paradigms collide.
These days you can also get a very good mouseless experience on Windows.
My current mouseless stack on Windows is: