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I'm a VIM user so I do buy the no-mouse manifesto. I do everything without a mouse and am more productive this way. OSX is not being very friendly, though. How I'm supposed to navigate through files and adjust windows without a mouse? The Finder is very mousy and there's no good way to substitute it.

MaiaVictor
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    Have you looked in Universal Access in system settings? That's where most of the keyboard shortcuts live. – K.A.Monica Jan 17 '13 at 22:55
  • What exactly are you looking to do? I drive OS X pretty much exclusively through the keyboard, with very few exceptions. – kejadlen Jan 17 '13 at 23:34
  • @kejadlen how do you use the Finder and reposition windows? – MaiaVictor Jan 17 '13 at 23:41
  • See my answer below. I pretty rarely reposition windows, so that's not something I really /need/ to do from the keyboard, but Slate is a pretty good option. – kejadlen Jan 18 '13 at 03:18
  • Since this answer question is closed, I will answer in the comment. I am trying to use the keyboard for most of the things I can. Chrome: Vimium C All by keyboard extension, you can do almost everything - click, search, select text, open other tabs. IntelliJIdea - IdeaVim - integrate Vim into the IDE. Launcher - RayCast - Launch apps, calculate, translate, and many more. MacOS - Homerow Keyboard shortcuts for every button in macOS. MacOS shortcuts - customizations. MacOS - accessibility can be configured to move the mouse with the keyboard.

    This is in summary.

     – Borislav Gizdov Jan 23 '24 at 13:40

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This question is pretty open-ended, but here's a small sampling of stuff that I use.

For more "heavy" operations, I turn to the Terminal, but it's actually fairly easy to use the keyboard to traverse the Finder. The arrow keys do what they normally do, but unlike Windows, enter renames the file, so you need to use Cmd+down to activate the selection. (Open a file or go down into a folder.)

Another shortcut that's invaluable for keyboard users is Cmd+Shift+?, which allows you to trivially search through the menubar items.

I also use Alfred extensively to switch between programs, both through the main UX and also by using Alfred's hotkey setup. I've also been playing around with Slate for window management, but that has been less of a priority. Lastly, the Pentadactyl Firefox plugin is vital to avoid the mouse (on all OSes).

kejadlen
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