Repeated keypresses are an application usage anti-pattern. We should try to recognise when we’re using repeated keypresses, and replace them with more meaningful alternatlves.

This whole idea comes from disabling your arrow keys in the Vim editor, because repeatedly pressing Up,Up,Up,Up is an inefficient way to use the editor. For that particular movement you could have used 4k to move up three lines.

There are many others places that repeated keypresses can be removed, here are a few ideas for:

  • Vim
  • Web browsers
  • Desktop Alt+Tab and application launching

Vim

If you get serious about learning Vim, one of the first things you should do is disable the arrow keys to train yourself away from them.

Unfortunately, that often leads to just repeating the same anti-pattern with the hjkl movement keys, like pressing kkkk to move up 4 lines.

Drew Neil (Vimcasts videos, Practical Vim book) has a post about this: Habit breaking, habit making (2013) where he introduces the idea of disabling the arrow and hjkl keys, and shows the old vim-hardmode plugin which is deprecated now.

The modern version of hardmode is vim-hardtime. I recommend using this and enabling it by default in your ~/.vimrc. Here are my settings:

let g:hardtime_default_on = 1
let g:hardtime_maxcount = 3

This lets me use one of the motion keys up to three times like jjj (to address overshoots and nearby quick movements) but no more.

To move around text, you can use the fF (forward/backward to character) or tT (to character) motions, or the /? keys (search forward/backward).

You can combine these with editing commands, for example, given the cursor at █:

The █quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

You could delete to “lazy” with dtl (delete, to, “l”). This gives us:

The █lazy dog.

What about more difficult text with similar characters?

She █sells sea shells by the sea shore.

This is where vim-sneak becomes useful. It uses the same ideas as the fFtT mappings, but matches two characters.

We could delete up to “shore” with dzsh; (delete, zneak, “sh”, next match). The “next match” is used because “shells” also starts with “sh”. This gives us:

She █shore.

The zZ mappings are used in motions because sS is more commonly used by vim-surround.

Moving around text normally, you use the sS motions.

To just move to “shore” we would have used ssh; (sneak to, sh, next match). This gives us:

She sells sea shells by the sea █shore.

vim-sneak also adds little coloured annotations so you can see all the “next matches” available on the page, and move to them with one letter. See the vim-sneak page for an image of those.

To move around lines easier, you could use vim-numbertoggle, which sets relative numbers and absolute numbers in a sensible way. Again see the link for a great image.

Web Browser

We all use web browsers with a lot of tabs these days, you probably find yourself using Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn to move through tabs. But that’s a repeated keypress. Is there a better way?

If you have 9 or less tabs open, you can move to them with Alt+number. For example, moving to the first tab is Alt+1, moving to the second tab is Alt+2 and so on. But we hit a limitation with 9 tabs, because Alt+8 is the 8th tab, and Alt+9 is the rightmost tab.

You can cycle through tabs with Ctrl+Tab and cycle backwards with Ctrl+Shift+Tab, but again this is a repeated keypress.

Firefox (the superior browser) allows tab search in its awesomebar. Hit Ctrl+L to focus the address bar and start typing an open tab match. You’ll get an option “Switch to Tab”, so press down and Enter and you’re there!

Firefox also allows you to map Ctrl+Tab to “switch to last tab”, for easily moving back and forth between two tabs. In Preferences, this is Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order.

Chrome/Chromium doesn’t have this as far as I can see. I don’t use the Chromium family of browsers at all, so I don’t know of an option there. Maybe there’s an extension? Maybe you should use Firefox.

Both browsers support this Ctrl+L to focus the address bar where you can:

  • Search with your default search engine: type a word and press Enter
  • Go to a .com domain: type the domain like “google” and press Ctrl+Enter to go to google.com

Both browsers support searching in the current page with Ctrl+f.

Firefox also supports finding clickable text with the ‘ (single quote, next to semicolon in US layout) then Enter to follow the link. This is great for browsing text-heavy pages like Wikipedia. Try it now with ‘wiki in Firefox (the search is not case sensitive).

Generally you should learn your browser keyboard shortcuts:

Alt+Tab

Here’s a spicy one. The pattern of switching through application with repeated Alt*Tab is one of the worst desktop usage patterns.

Tiling window managers like i3 and Sway try to avoid this by having applications on different workspaces (virtual desktops) which you can switch to with Win+number, or by having applications in a split which you switch to with the Vim direction keys Win+hjkl. This is pretty good.

The rofi application launcher does smart partial matching of commands or applications to launch, narrowing down options as you type.

So you can rofi -show drun and start typing fir then just press Enter to launch Firefox.

i3 and Sway bind rofi -show drun to Win+d for this purpose.

I propose to change this to rofi -combi-modi window,drun,run -show combi which adds a window switcher. You can use windowcd to limit it to the current workspace. I bind this to Win+Space for my desktop, but you could bind it to Win+d if you use i3/Sway, or take the plunge and bind it to Alt+Tab.

Now you can hit your key, type the partial name of the window you want, and switch to it with Enter. Much quicker and better than cycling through Alt+Tab until you get there.

This has the added advantage that if the appication isn’t already open, it’s launched instead!

This is also a much better way to launch applications than clicking a “Start” button and browsing through a menu. I prefer this to the “activities” idea that desktops like GNOME/Pantheon/Unity try to implement.

Summary

Find repeated keypresses in your current workflow and eliminate them.

This will give you a more efficient and more intentioned application usage experience.

Get the computer to do what you actually want quickly, instead of doomscrolling through all available options.

What replacements have you found which are useful?