Üstün Özgür

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Opera and vi Style Navigation Scrolling Shortcuts

I'm an emacs user, but honestly, vi style navigation is better if you are a touch typist. By vi style navigation, I mean scrolling down with j and up with k, and with these keys, you can keep your hands on the home row.

One thing that annoys me reading web pages is that in order to scroll, I have to press the down button instead; however this has an easy fix in Opera since it supports customizable one key shortcuts.

Go to Tools - Preferences.
Go to Advanced - Shortcuts
Select Enable single-key shortcuts.
Duplicate the current keyboard setup by pressing Duplicate.
Select the new duplicate keyboard setup, press Edit.
Select the Browser Window group.
Select New, for the shortcut, enter "j", for the command, enter Scroll down.
Select New, for the shortcut, enter "k", for the command, enter Scroll up.
Select OK, and make sure you select the duplicate, not the original keyboard set.

Now, you can scroll down with j and up with k. This works in all sites except those that make use of j already, like Gmail and Google Reader. j and k already have different functions in those sites.

Combined with this Readability tip, it makes perusing the web much nicer.

February 27, 2010

Opera and Readability Bookmarklet Shortcut

Arclab's Readability is a browser bookmarklet that gets the text of the current webpage you are viewing, and reformats it for a much better reading experience. Since it is Javascript based, it is usable with most browsers.

One catch though is, one has to click the readability link and there is no keyboard shortcut. I have seen a Google Chrome extension that assigns a keyboard shortcut to readability, and since Opera is my browser of choice, came up with a solution for Opera.

Go to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ and select your preferred style.
Now, instead of dragging the bookmarklet to your toolbar, right click it and select "Copy Link Address".
Go to the Speed Dial page in Opera, and assign one of the speed dial pages (1-9) with the link you copied.
Now, you can view any page with Readability by pressing Ctrl-1 for example if you have assigned the Readability for the first SpeedDial page.

Also see http://www.ustunozgur.com/2010/02/opera-and-vi-style-navigation-scrolling.html for more reading tips within Opera.

Alternative Method:

The method above, though simple forces you to sacrifice a speeddial just for Readability. Also, one can't assign an alternative keyboard shortcut, like Ctrl-r to his liking. An alternative approach is to assign a shortcut in Opera that goes to the Readability bookmarklet:

Copy the Readability bookmarklets url to clipboard as above.
Go to Tools-Preferences.
Go to Advanced-Shortcuts.
Keyboard setup, Edit.
Click on Application.
Click New, for the shortcut key, Enter r Ctrl if you want Ctrl-r for readability.
For the action, enter Go to page," (with only opening quote), then paste the url and close the quote " .
Now, Ctrl-r is assigned to reload by default, search for r ctrl and remove that assignment in the shortcuts list.
Pressing Ctrl-r on any page will format it using Readability now. Obviously, this method works for any bookmarklet, for example, Instapaper.