One of the reasons I enjoy working as much as possible within Emacs is that I have a consistent mouseless interface to all my applications. That means that I develop muscle memory for most of what I do and I never have the cache miss of reaching for the mouse. I’m a touch typist so being able to do everything from the keyboard is a real win for me.
But what if you aren’t an Emacs user and still want to keyboard driven environment? It turns out there’s an answer that Ethan Schoonover brilliantly demonstrates in his video, XMonad Demo. Xmonad, for those of you who don’t know, is a tiling window manager for the X Window system. It’s very configurable and can allow you to live an almost mouseless life.
The features are too legion to detail in a short blog post so you should take a look at Schoonover’s video. He demonstrates a custom configuration that can even adjust itself depending on what screen he’s using. There’s a link to his configuration if you’d like to duplicate it or use it as a starting point for your own.
Those of us living in the Mac world can’t take advantage of Xmonad, of course, but if I were using X, I would definitely want it as my window manager. After you watch the video, you’ll see why. The video is 17 minutes so you may have to schedule some time.
Update : Fixed links.