Wrist Resting

Wednesday, 8 December 1999

There was a piece in today's Slashdot about configuring Unix windows managers so as to not need the mouse (or any other pointing device) at all. I was suprised to learn that this is difficult. It's something that concerns me because I'm trying to shift the bulk of my computing to keyboard input instead of mouse use to spare my right wrist. You can't totally elimiate the mouse on a Mac, but there's a lot that can be done:

• I've built a tremendous Favorites file that I use with Internet Explorer, and IE allows me to enter the start of an URL or title and it will automatically offer a completion out of my Favorties. With the Command-L shortcut for entering a new page, this allows me to look at any of my commonly-used pages without touching the mouse once I've got MSIE in the foreground.
• I'm a registered user of Program Switcher, which allows me to switch between open applications with a keyboard combination (I use Command-Tab).
• I'm trying to switch to doing the bulk of my HTML writing in Alpha, which offers a much richer set of key bindings then BBEdit does. I haven't figured out how to duplicate BBEdit's great support for Perl-scriptable persistent includes.
• I'm making extensive use of utilities that allow me to compress multiple mouse-actions into a single mouse-action:
• DragThing provides me with floating palettes into which I can stick aliases for many of the folders and applications I use a lot, including a few custom Perl scripts.
• CMTools is a good set of freeware modules for the Contextual Menu in MacOS 8 and higher. Even simple things like the "Make Alias In..." command save me a lot of opening and closing folder.

I had a nice productive day yesterday and got to dust off my graphic design skills. We had to put together a quick diagram to demonstrate a transaction model to a client's bosses, and our freelance artist wasn't in yet, so when it was discovered that I know PhotoShop I got pressed into service to do a little fine-tuning. As I was working on it, I realized that the current diagram was confusing and just ineffective from an information-design point of view ("This isn't a circular transaction, so why are we diagramming it on a circle?"), so I totally redid it in Adobe Illustrator.