I've just written a script so that when I am playing quake, I can simply use the numpad for pointer movement and throw way the mouse entirely :D

But in all seriousness, this was a pretty helpful post even if I'm not so against the mouse as you. I've been trying out some window managers (awesome wm) lately and plan on trying out ratpoison right now. I doubt I'll switch away permanently from a DE, but as someone who is really bad about having a hundred windows open this might help streamline my focus.

The only reason I haven't used Pentadactyl is because it isn't available for any of the recent versions of FF. Chrome + vimium is worse than IE! Vimium is actually pretty annoying, but it's mostly usable with almost no learning curve. On the other hand, firefox doesn't work well with my current workflow. At this point, I can't tell whether I'm annoyed more by chromium or firefox, but I'm hating them both.

I'd also have to add Krusader in as an highly configurable gui file manager that is keyboard friendly.. certainly not to the extent of Ranger I would assume, but similar to MC.

Cmus and apvlv also look quite promising.

Oh wow :D Thank you for that.

If chromium was less restrictive (and had Pentadactyl, a decent download manager, etc.) and didn't suck with themes, I would like it a lot more. If firefox was less ugly and had maintained equivalents of all the extensions I'm using, it would be much better for me. At this point, if I'm using one, I'm frustrated that it doesn't have something that the other does.

Does Pentadactyl allow for bookmark saving and navigation? That would be a big plus for me. I'm currently using an extension called bookmarx that allows for mouseless folder navigation when saving bookmarks to compensate for chromium's terrible way of adding bookmarks.

Yeah, it's not a lightweight file manager. It has a great deal of features. The only downside is that the default keybindings are heavily modifier based which can be a pain (they are changeable though) and it's easy to get lost in everything it can do. I think it even has a vi input mode for its internal editor. I've never used gnome commander, but I do love two pane file managers. Knowing that ranger is meant to have vi like keybindings is enough to get me to switch though. There's also vifm (a two pane file manager I haven't tried), but it seems to be less robust than ranger. I'll probably end up trying them both.

Hmmm very cool, but at first glance, it doesn't seem to have a way of choosing the folder the bookmark goes in.. or am I wrong?

Just to be able to choose which folder it saves in (essentially like a file manager I guess). I have all my bookmarks organized by topic. I just installed ratpoison. It's nice and minimalistic. Out of curiosity, are you using arch?

I see you like XFCE :). There is absolutely no problem in using the panel with ratpoison if you would like to. Infact I have it setup right now and can toggle it with a keybind.

Ratpoison has a tmpwm where you can temporarily give control of the windows to another wm. I've used it a few times with JWM and it works wonders if you wan't to stack something ( I think the only case in which I did that was when I wanted a window to span across multiple monitors).

Terminal multiplexors are a must for any serious terminal user. I started using GNU screen and even though tmux is arguable better, I haven't bothered because ratpoison is based on screen and is largely more consistent with :0.

Ranger is pure awesomnes, easy marking of directories, multiple tabs and ease of use made me stick with it.

Edit:

Uhm, the machine I'm using right now is running ubuntu since at the time when I was installing a distro, the kernel didn't support the ethernet chipset and arch didn't have a wifi driver by default. Soo if I wanted arch I had to install it without internet connection and then download the source for the ethernet drivers from somewhere else and then install them through usb :/. Ubuntu atleast had the wifi drivers by default :D.

In ratpoisoin you can bind any possible keyboard combination to it's function. It uses emacs like syntax so you can bind control, super, shift and meta (alt) to anything you might want. By default however ratpoison utilized a escape key which is kind of like a sticky key.

Ratpoison does support multiple monitors very well. I have a dual monitor setup and it is working flawlessly.

With ubuntu I ended up removing much more than I installed. Imo it doesn't matter how much stuff you have installed if you are not running them and most of the programs I use are very resources lite anyway :).

If I need to install GNU/Linux on this machine again, then I would probably chose arch or the ubuntu minimal install.

Ratpoison is becoming more attractive by the minute. Multiple monitor support is especially nice.

Uninstalling things is kind of a pain. The nicest thing about me for arch beside choosing everything on install is the aur.

You could pretty much do everything in the terminal if you wanted to (though browsing with w3m, elinks, lynx, etc all the time would probably be pretty painful). It would probably be harder to do things the other way around (synaptic and the ubuntu gui app store thing quickly became a pain for me; command line is pretty much a must for any linux user). I think a combination of the two works fine together though. As for "bridging functionality," I'm not quite sure what you mean. Where is the disjoint?

@vaskozl I've decided to totally phase out mouse usage and switch to more tui/cli applications. Right now I'm working on switching to ranger for file management and the only problem that I'm having is integrating it with the web browser/making it the default fm. I assume that you can use ranger to save files if it's the only file manager you're using. If not, what are you using to save files from firefox? I made a .desktop file to open ranger in the terminal and set it as the default with xdg-mime and put it in mimeapps.list, etc. but xfce seems to override this, and I've had no luck so far working with "preferred applications." What is your setup?

Edit: I was able to set ranger to the preferred file manager and get it to open when selecting "file manager,' but this has no effect on browser saving behaviour.. I wonder what would happen if I uninstalled thunar.

Indeed that's what I was thinking, but saving won't be a "disjoint" if I find a better way to do it. Not using the mouse with thunar is possible but very slow. If I can't use ranger to save things, then I could just opt for a more keyboard friendly gui fm. If mouseless file management doesn't matter, then I see no problem or disjoint with using thunar to save things, and if I can find a way to get rid of thunar completely, it won't matter that it doesn't know what I've been doing in the terminal. It already doesn't really matter since at this point I'm only using it for saving things.

Browsing is one thing I wouldn't do in the terminal. I don't see how using gui apps causes a disjoint. You'd have to give a specific example of how the shell could be so much better; I don't quite follow.

Well if you don't think that's an optimal solution (I don't really see why it matters) that's still a user failure. I use ST3 and have never done that.

>I doubt you can, but prove me wrong.
(Your method of quoting is easier and takes up less space) I doubt I can too. I couldn't find any information on doing such a thing. I don't know if it's possible to use something different for saving things at all. Keyboard use is still possible, but not nearly as fast.

>Defeatist!
Well you didn't seem to really care about going mouseless, which is why I said that.

>Then you may as well just save everything into an inbox and organize it later with Ranger.
That's one way of doing it, but I see it as a waste of time to do it later. I used to just save stuff in a folder to move later instead of putting things in the correct place and never would actually get around to fixing it (and if I did, I might not remember what I meant to do with it). But you're right; the only thing I would do differently is to move it with ranger immediately. Doing it like that kind of gets rid of the need to change the behaviour of the save menu anyway. I was really just over-thinking this whole thing. You solved the disjoint for me:
•change default save location and make a two letter alias for it
•Contol+s or click on download link; enter to save (or set auto-save for downloads)
•key combo for terminal
•two letter alias to both go to the directory and then open in ranger; cut and then move to desired directory with marks and find
Takes less than two seconds, pretty much eliminating the need to replace the gui save menu.

>You've already noticed that it does by mentioning the separation in the first place between GUI and CLI.
I don't consider separation to be a disjoint. To call using different types of applications for different things a "disjoint" just doesn't make sense to me. You might as well call using multiple windows a disjoint or not being able to do everything with just one program a disjoint. Using both gui and terminal applications isn't problematic unless there is a conflict that hurts functionality or efficiency (for example if I had to use w3m part of the time and firefox part of the time because some functionality was lacked by both that the other had; this would definitely cause a disjoint in that if I was using firefox and had to switch to w3m I would no longer have the same open tabs, bookmarks, addons, etc.). I don't see this to really be a problem in any area at the moment though.

>You know how fantastic auto-completion/command-completion is when it works?
That seems more like an example of how gui apps could be better and learn something from the shell xD As for auto-completion, it's already everywhere. ZSH auto-completion is phenomenal already and aliases save even more pain. You're pretty much set in the terminal with that. Word processors have auto-completion (libre office and open office have smart auto-completion that learns from what you're typing). Vim and ST, for example, have plenty of plugins for auto-completion for code and normal language. Search engines auto-complete your searches. Launchers are now smart and can tell what you want before you've typed the full name based on frequency of use or open. What more auto-completion do you need? OS wide built-in auto-completion would be cool, but I don't think that you can realistically cater to every application.

Maybe what you want is autokey? You can set up your own phrases or hotkeys to expand text. Example: I have "#=" set up to the following (which I use for titles/section dividers to make my config and txt files more easily readable and navigable):

#==============================
#
#==============================   

Other text expanders (ex: phraseexpress) learn from what you type and offer auto-completion. Have you tried these? A decent clipboard manager can also give you better system wide functionality.

I don't know what you mean by create an interface. As for marking most visited places, I see very little benefit automating that process. It's easy enough to mark them yourself, and then you actually have control over what letter things are assigned to. I already have what I need set to automount as well.

>The comment was really that users must not be happy in putting something like OSX's Finder at the core of their work pattern.
Ah yes, well finder is very much a pain to work with in my experience.

I don't know why you're picking Android in particular, but a lot of people don't really care about the file system. As long as I still can get access to it, I wouldn't really care (not so much the case with iOS).

As for backup and syncing, I have aliases for rsync set up so that I can backup everything with a single command. I guess it's probably because I'm a heavy computer user with a very large and organized file structure, but trying to work with everything in a My Documents folder would be a total nightmare for me. My productivity would decrease dramatically. Organization is a problem, and I actually have created documents that detail the interaction between my whole file system (and computer). I have naming schemes, rules/policy for organizing the file structure, policy for dealing with any information I want to store or read later, policy for dealing with different file types (I keep everything I can on a usb for easy access so most videos, for example, go in a folder structure on my computer). My bookmark folders are modeled after this file structure and mirror them by topic. It's pretty complicated but necessary to prevent confusion and ensure that things go smoothly for someone who has maybe hundreds of folders and thousands of files like me.

Wow, by that dev's standard, having 2 places to save is too much.

About the download dialog:
I think the default and best behaviour is to save everything in the "downloads" folder. I then just switch to ranger and manipulate the file from there.

As to incosistency and disjoint:
It really matters how you pick your programs. Most programs by default have common shortcuts. Think vanilla ubuntu, mac or windows. They all have the same copy, paste, save and similar shortcuts for opening new tabs, documents, quiting etc. even for the default terminal.

If you start using programs like vim and emacs then you will get a disjoint because of the very different ideology behind the program. This however doesn't prevent you from using tools that are consitent with each other.

The shell's have vim and emacs navigation modes. There are tons of cli programs that have vim or emacs mappings and there are quite a few gui programs that utilise them as well such as apvlv and pentadactyl(vim) or conkeror(emacs).

It's all a matter of what you want.

It's been a while since this thread has seen any love. I've changed quite a few things over the past month to make my workflow more keyboard friendly, and I thought this was interesting enough to warrant a post.

I've found out lately that pentadactyl works quite well in conjunction with shellscript, and this makes it possible to essentially replace the gui save dialog with ranger.

Pentadactyl already has ;s and :w. These make possible to bypass the dialog and allow for tab completion of path, but this is still pretty cumbersome. I've set up the following autocommand:

au DownloadPost * :silent !~/bin/ranger_browser_fm.sh <file>

This will send the file location of a download to a simple script I wrote:

#!/bin/sh
bspc rule -a termite -o floating=true center=true
termite -e "/bin/zsh -c 'xdo resize -w +300 && xdo move -x -150 && xdo resize -h +200 && xdo move -y -100 && ranger --selectfile=$1 --cmd="cut"'" &

The "bspc" and "xdo" stuff is just for my window manager. Basically it just sets terminal window to floating, centers it, and then makes it bigger. The important part is to open a terminal and execute a ranger command. I believe urxvt and xterm both also use the "-e" flag. This will select the downloaded file, and then cut it. You can also add other ranger commands if you want.

Sadly, I don't know of any way to do this in reverse for the upload dialog.

I've also started streaming all videos in mpv and am working on turning every text box into vim with pterosaur (to replace <c-i> and broken iabbr..). Pentadactyl is pretty great. Though it does kind of bug me that the issue for adding folder support to bookmarks has been open for 3 years, is the second most starred issue and of "high priority", and still has seen little progress.