Progress>Hegel?

This week has been an interesting one, full of nice little discoveries that make things ever-so-slightly better.

Firstly I’ve been getting to grips with the Gnome-terminal and using it a lot more. The really useful thing has been the ability to open files in programs while granting them temporary superuser privileges. Which I learnt how to do this week:

sudo bluefish /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Not only that, but I’ve simply been using it a lot more to do everything, and making sure to look up commands that i don’t understand when I read them in howto guides on the net. Slowly, the point of doing things this way becomes clear. Certainly for playing with things on the Apache server I’ve got running on the PC it’s very useful.

Meanwhile I’ve installed Drupal to play about with it. The instant power of the bundled modules is apparent right from the start, but I suspect that there is quite a lot to learn with regards to getting right down into editing both the themes and the back-of-house that would have to be done to get it to be actually useful. Until then, it’s simply quite ugly.

This week’s other development was to begin learning python. Which is going relatively well, although thinking in it is still a long way off, I’m at least now able to read it and understand what’s going on. More to follow I suspect.

The sound of keyboards

After half an hour of intense stupidity I eventually got the jMP3 plugin working properly without having bulky embed object code at every line, which was nice. Turns out that yes, it works exactly like it says on the instructions page, but I was forgetting to change the # to . to attribute the player to a class rather than a div. Never mind, at least now I know.

What has been changing the way I use the internet is discovering all the keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. It started with me trying to fix the backspace button so that I could go to the previous page rather than scroll up through anchors. This seems to be an issue with Ubuntu, and is fixed by going to about:config, and then changing the browser.backspace_action value to 0. I learned this from a blog somewhere that I’ve forgotten, I’ll edit a link here when I find it.

This then led me to search for a way to jump to the URL bar using the keyboard, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do but didn’t know how. That led me to this article which has all sorts of useful keyboard shortcuts for Firefox.

Which has somewhat changed my browsing experience. I now use these all the time:

alt+d - jump to url bar
‘(string) - to find link text on a page
ctrl+g - jump to the next instance of find
ctrl+enter - open link in new tab
ctrl+shift+enter - open link in new tab and give focus
alt+left - back button
alt+right - forwards button
ctrl+w - close current tab

In conjunction with the Gnome desktop shortcuts:

alt+ctrl+arrowkey - switch workspace
alt+f2 - open application..
alt+f1 - applications menu.
alt+f9 - minimise window
alt+f10 - maximise window
ctrl+alt+shift+arrow - move current window to different workspace

I now rarely use the mouse at all. Which possibly makes things quicker, but certainly means that I don’t have to keep raising my arm. After all, wasn’t doing everything by typing the point of Linux?