How I click on links.
If you watched my previous video, "How I Select Stuff Via the Keyboard," you know that I hate using a mouse. To make my workflow smoother, I optimize my actions with simple shortcuts on my keyboard that I can control and customize. One of my favorite shortcuts is for opening links — which happens to be the focus of this tutorial!
In this video, I'll give you a quick walkthrough of Vimium, a Chrome extension that allows my to visit links straight from my keyboard without having to engage a mouse or trackpad. It's been super useful for me, and I think you'll enjoy it, too.
In this video, I'll give you a quick walkthrough of Vimium, a Chrome extension that allows my to visit links straight from my keyboard without having to engage a mouse or trackpad. It's been super useful for me, and I think you'll enjoy it, too.
Transcript
Hey what's up? Today I'm going to show you how I click on links. Or rather, how I don't click on links. I use a Chrome extension called Vimium, which allows you to activate the plugin, and then select a link using the keyboard. This saves a lot of time for me personally because I use a Wacom tablet, so going back and forth is kind of annoying. And then also when I'm just using my laptop without a monitor or keyboard attached, it's kind of annoying to use the trackpad, and it's just easier to just type, activate the plugin, and then select the link. I'll show you how it works, and I'll show you how to set it up, and then also how to customize it. So let's get started! I'm going to go ahead and search for Dover Illustrations, if I can spell, and then normally I would just click on the first link here. What I'm going to do is activate the Vimium plugin by pushing the F key. You can customize the activation keyboard shortcut but by default it's F and it works fine for me. So here you can see all of the alpha codes that appear over each link. For whichever link that I would like to select, I just have to type the corresponding alpha code. So I'll go ahead and do SP, and then boom, it'll open the desired link inside of the same window. Now let's say I was doing some research, and I wanted to open multiple links in different tabs from one search. I'm going to go ahead and go back, command left bracket, and normally if I was researching something, or someone or not stalking, or stalking allegedly I would hold down the command key and then click on each link that I would like to explore, and then go through all of my results. That way I don't have to keep googling something. I can do one google search and pull all of the results out of that one search. I'll go ahead and close these tabs. And now I'm going to go ahead and do it with Vimium. So I'll go ahead and push F, and instead of typing the alpha code, I'm going to go ahead and type shift, the alpha code, or essentially the capital versions of it. The caps letter versions of it, you know what I mean. So I'll do shift SM and it'll open that first link, and then I'll do F, shift, FS, and it'll open the second one, and so on, and so on. And then now I can go through and see the links, from my search, all without moving my hand back to my Wacom tablet, or to my mouse. All right, so to install it just Google Vimium V-I-M-I-U-M. Vim was a terminal text editor, or something like that, so they made it where you can edit text with just the keyboard. So that's where it kind of comes from. But you can search for Vimium, and it's on the Chrome Web Store. I believe they have it for Firefox and Safari as well. So you just install it, and then if you'd like to customize it, go ahead and click on the little icon here with the V. And then you can go to options, and here I've excluded some URLs because some websites have keyboard shortcuts automatically built, in so sometimes the Vimium shortcuts interact with the keyboard shortcuts from the website, and it just causes problems. So you can go ahead and list that website here, and then you can also do some custom key mappings you can change the available commands to different keys. So let's say I went ahead and clicked here. I have a custom keyboard mapping to go back. So I'll push J. And if I want to go forward I'll push K. So those are two common forward and back keyboard shortcuts in Adobe, for Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects, random tidbit. But I'll go ahead and do J. And then another one that I use is D and U. So, down and up, so you can go down halfway, and not just doing the page up and page down. Also, if I want to go to the bottom I just do G, or shift G, and it'll go all the way to the bottom. I'll go up, so instead of using page up, page down you can do G shift G or GG. You can look at the keyboard mappings which I'll show you now. So you can do show available commands, and here are all of the cool commands that Vimium has. By default, an option that I do is I go ahead and customize the color and the font size of the alpha codes. By default I think it's yellow and black. Let's see if it'll come up here. Yeah it looks like this it's just not visually pleasing, so I go ahead and change that, and I'll show you where to change it. You go to advanced options in the Vimium, settings, and then you go here, and you could change the CSS for the alpha codes. I'll go ahead and post mine in the description box of this video so you can use mine if you want, or change the colors to whatever you want. Another cool feature is you can limit the characters used for the hints. I've done this so that way it only uses a certain set, and if you do use a website that has custom keyboard shortcuts, this is a good way to customize Vimium to work with that so you won't have to exclude it. But it's a pretty cool plugin, and it saves time, and if you have any questions you can always email me at hello@theproductivityshop.co, or you can join the Productivity Shop slack channel [http://prodshop.co/slack]. Thanks for watching, and that's the last thing to say, and I'll see you later. Bye! [Productvitiy Shop Jingle] A quick P.S., um if you're wondering what this is, it's a little painting of a dog called Frizzy Chewbarka, on Instagram. I just think he's so cute, and there was an artist who painted these, and has been giving them out with, for a small adoption fee, and shipping um... They're totally cute, and if you would like to just brighten your day by watching this cute little dog run around and do zoomies, is what they call them, you can check out their Instagram profile here. Anyway end of P.S.
Hey what's up? Today I'm going to show you how I click on links. Or rather, how I don't click on links. I use a Chrome extension called Vimium, which allows you to activate the plugin, and then select a link using the keyboard. This saves a lot of time for me personally because I use a Wacom tablet, so going back and forth is kind of annoying. And then also when I'm just using my laptop without a monitor or keyboard attached, it's kind of annoying to use the trackpad, and it's just easier to just type, activate the plugin, and then select the link. I'll show you how it works, and I'll show you how to set it up, and then also how to customize it. So let's get started! I'm going to go ahead and search for Dover Illustrations, if I can spell, and then normally I would just click on the first link here. What I'm going to do is activate the Vimium plugin by pushing the F key. You can customize the activation keyboard shortcut but by default it's F and it works fine for me. So here you can see all of the alpha codes that appear over each link. For whichever link that I would like to select, I just have to type the corresponding alpha code. So I'll go ahead and do SP, and then boom, it'll open the desired link inside of the same window. Now let's say I was doing some research, and I wanted to open multiple links in different tabs from one search. I'm going to go ahead and go back, command left bracket, and normally if I was researching something, or someone or not stalking, or stalking allegedly I would hold down the command key and then click on each link that I would like to explore, and then go through all of my results. That way I don't have to keep googling something. I can do one google search and pull all of the results out of that one search. I'll go ahead and close these tabs. And now I'm going to go ahead and do it with Vimium. So I'll go ahead and push F, and instead of typing the alpha code, I'm going to go ahead and type shift, the alpha code, or essentially the capital versions of it. The caps letter versions of it, you know what I mean. So I'll do shift SM and it'll open that first link, and then I'll do F, shift, FS, and it'll open the second one, and so on, and so on. And then now I can go through and see the links, from my search, all without moving my hand back to my Wacom tablet, or to my mouse. All right, so to install it just Google Vimium V-I-M-I-U-M. Vim was a terminal text editor, or something like that, so they made it where you can edit text with just the keyboard. So that's where it kind of comes from. But you can search for Vimium, and it's on the Chrome Web Store. I believe they have it for Firefox and Safari as well. So you just install it, and then if you'd like to customize it, go ahead and click on the little icon here with the V. And then you can go to options, and here I've excluded some URLs because some websites have keyboard shortcuts automatically built, in so sometimes the Vimium shortcuts interact with the keyboard shortcuts from the website, and it just causes problems. So you can go ahead and list that website here, and then you can also do some custom key mappings you can change the available commands to different keys. So let's say I went ahead and clicked here. I have a custom keyboard mapping to go back. So I'll push J. And if I want to go forward I'll push K. So those are two common forward and back keyboard shortcuts in Adobe, for Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects, random tidbit. But I'll go ahead and do J. And then another one that I use is D and U. So, down and up, so you can go down halfway, and not just doing the page up and page down. Also, if I want to go to the bottom I just do G, or shift G, and it'll go all the way to the bottom. I'll go up, so instead of using page up, page down you can do G shift G or GG. You can look at the keyboard mappings which I'll show you now. So you can do show available commands, and here are all of the cool commands that Vimium has. By default, an option that I do is I go ahead and customize the color and the font size of the alpha codes. By default I think it's yellow and black. Let's see if it'll come up here. Yeah it looks like this it's just not visually pleasing, so I go ahead and change that, and I'll show you where to change it. You go to advanced options in the Vimium, settings, and then you go here, and you could change the CSS for the alpha codes. I'll go ahead and post mine in the description box of this video so you can use mine if you want, or change the colors to whatever you want. Another cool feature is you can limit the characters used for the hints. I've done this so that way it only uses a certain set, and if you do use a website that has custom keyboard shortcuts, this is a good way to customize Vimium to work with that so you won't have to exclude it. But it's a pretty cool plugin, and it saves time, and if you have any questions you can always email me at hello@theproductivityshop.co, or you can join the Productivity Shop slack channel [http://prodshop.co/slack]. Thanks for watching, and that's the last thing to say, and I'll see you later. Bye! [Productvitiy Shop Jingle] A quick P.S., um if you're wondering what this is, it's a little painting of a dog called Frizzy Chewbarka, on Instagram. I just think he's so cute, and there was an artist who painted these, and has been giving them out with, for a small adoption fee, and shipping um... They're totally cute, and if you would like to just brighten your day by watching this cute little dog run around and do zoomies, is what they call them, you can check out their Instagram profile here. Anyway end of P.S.
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