No, I’m not talking about fat ladies singing. For many years, I’ve used the Opera web browser. I started off with Opera back in about 2000 when I was using Windows because of the security problems with Internet Explorer, and because the other main alternatives at that time were Netscape or Mozilla which seemed rather bloated and slow to me. Later on, Mozilla Firefox came on to the scene, but it was still slower than Opera, and didn’t have the sheer convenience and joy that Opera has for heavy keyboard users. Even today, now that Firefox has caught up with Opera in terms of speed and performance—perhaps even slightly overtaken—it’s still just plain awkward to use with the keyboard.
That was until I decided to give Vimperator a proper run for its money. It’s basically an add-on for Firefox that makes Firefox look and behave a lot like the popular command-line text editor, Vim. Vim is entirely keyboard driven, so Vimperator makes Firefox entirely keyboard accessible too. I think Vimperator might just save my life—not only matching Opera for its keyboard friendliness, but outstripping it completely and allowing me to do even more with my keyboard.
Woo hooo!
I also came across quite a nice little line on the Vimperator wiki. Vimperator removes all of the buttons and menus from the Firefox interface because they’re just not necessary for keyboard users (I already remove the buttons and menus from my Opera configuration). The Vimperator position seems to be, “What? So the 80+ buttons on your keyboard aren’t enough for you?”
