In the name of ergonomics, I'm training myself to not touch the mouse and keep hand movement to a minimum. Here's a few tips that have been the most helpful to me:

  • changing tabs in firefox: use alt-numbers. I keep gmail open in tab 1, so switching to it would be alt-1. mostly, my most recent tab is the furthest one out in my bloated tab bar. To get to the last tab, press alt-9. Great for quickly checking any email, then switching back to whatever else I was reading.
  • Code editing with emacs/vimpulse. I'm no pro, but I have used vim for about 5 years, thanks mostly to Gentoo Linux tutorials. I admit to being the typical noob, and staying almost exclusively in insert mode. As part of my experimentation, I followed the superb vimtutor tutorial (just type in vimtutor at your command prompt if vim is installed). vim is awesome! you can move about so easily! However, all of my internet reading suggested that the architecture of emacs would get me a little further in the long run. In emacs, moving around in files is not quite as easy. This is where vimpulse (or viper) comes into play. It lets me use vim commands to move around, but allows me to do so within the framework of emacs. Best of both worlds!

I'm out for now, but I'll update this post or make new ones as I explore.