Earlier this year, while browsing hackernews, I stumbled on a comment thread which I didn’t really think much of at the time.
The poster “PeeMcGee” mentioned a small ritual that his coworker practiced called Mouseless Monday Mornings, essentially his entire team would unplug their mice (mouses? meese?) every monday and try to navigate their OS and work without the use of a mouse until lunch time. At the time I thought it was a pretty novel idea, but I didn’t really care to adopt the practice. I figured i’d lose too much efficiency, and frankly I’ve had 20 years of using a mouse to develop bad habits, I couldn’t possibly break those.
The thread clearly stuck in my brain however (y’know, since i’m writing about it 9 months later), and this week I decided to do my own experiment in the field of “going mouseless”. To add to the complexity because i’m apparently a masochist, I figured since i’m trying to avoid using a mouse, I may as well go ahead and learn the holy grail of the mouseless, the Shangri-La of the cursor-deficient: Vim
Vim has intrigued me ever since my first couple of weeks as a linux sysadmin. Every time I’d try to google something related to my job, or even while I was studying for my RHCE, Vim kept popping up. “It’s so efficient!” was the online consensus, “learning vim properly changed my life”. So I tried using vim for a little while, and i’m still comfortable-ish using it, but I would say I’m a vim user the same way my 12 year old cousin with ChatGPT is a software developer.
I’m starting my journey focusing on a couple of applications that I heavily use, and forcing them to use Vim shortcuts/keybindings where possible. The first target: Firefox. I am extremely lucky that i’m not the first person to really desire a more keyboard friendly, vim-like experience for the browser. Which is where Vimium comes in - A browser extension that essentially gives you the ability to browse using Vim keybindings.
Want to scroll up and down? Better use h & j instead of your scroll wheel (shift-H and shift-J will scroll through your tabs instead). Shift-G will go straight to the bottom of a webpage and gg of course returns you to the top of the page much like in our favourite text editor. You can even enter find mode using /! The coolest feature of Vimium though, is it’s link-mode: Pressing f will create highlights next to all the clickable elements on a page, typing the shortcut within those highlights will “click” the link for you. You can use shift-F to force the link to open in a new tab if you’d prefer as well.
This immediately felt good, it took a couple of hours but eventually I was defaulting to the keyboard when browsing and leaning less on the mouse.
Next up - Obsidian. I’ve written about Obsidian before, it’s basically a fancy and very extensible markdown editor that is free, offline, and makes my days a lot smoother because I document things I do. But what I was not aware of was that Obsidian comes with, by default, vim shortcuts! No plugin or anything needed, the only (admittedly funny) roadblock to turning them on was that you need to know how to quit a document without saving it using Vim’s shortcuts.
Writing notes in Obsidian was working like vim, but I was still having to default to the mouse when navigating to new notes, or try to search. Instead of setting up a million different keybinds that i’d have to learn and try to match up with Vim, I ended up finding a plugin called Click Hints which essentially replicated exactly with Vimium did for firefox. Now I could easily move around my vault without too much difficulty!
I’m only a week into this experiment but i’m already getting better at defaulting to keyboard for various applications that I use. Slack in particular took a while to get used to, but their default keyboard shortcuts actually make a lot of sense once you get used to them. If all continues to go well, this might well be my new default way of using computers!