TL;DR: Install the Vimium extension for Firefox or Chrome. Forget your mouse.Press ? and surf the web like a hacker.
About Vimium
If you know Vim and Chromium, you can guess what Vimium is. You can read more about it on Github and all the trivial installation guide.
Skeptical?
To search stuff online you do not need the mouse. It may be a little tricky to get started with Vimium and I personally was very reluctant to learn it - even though a former colleague warmly recommended it. I was let down by the “steep learning curve”. Well, now I can say that there barely is a learning curve.
After few hours of practise, I master the few keystroke that I really need to surf most of the pages I visit regularly. For everything else I alway refer to my best Vim friends:
ESCresent any current command and goes back to normal mode.?pop up the help menu
Touch typing is a prerequisite to avoid frustration when using Vim(ium) 😎.
Why is it useful for scientific computing?
Pipelines. CI/CD. Github. Gitlab.
If you didn’t know, I’m a bit fan of Gitlab and I have adopted very early back in 2017, but the one thing I did not like is the amount of clicking it takes to get to where I want. Just relaunching a pipeline is nearly 10 clicks away from the project’s homepage. Github is also a bit clucky in this regard.
I did not expect Vimium to be so useful, and I was impressed to see that it takes that pain away. The 10 clicks turned into a dozen of keystrokes and that’s amazing!
So, yes, Vimium is beneficial also in scientific computing and DevOps in general.
Extra sweetener
Make it cool with your favorite flavour of Catpuccin theme.