In this thread, let's discuss keyboard-driven use of the Lemmy desktop
web UI.
The elephant in the room is Reddit's recent decision to destroy its
longstanding relationship with community development which, in my view,
helped that website retain its stature as The Link Aggregator for years
and years after its core content stream and central administration had
fallen into the toilet. Today I chose Lemmy as my new aggregator because
its development philosophy and resulting implementation of the
ActivityPub federation protocol meet my insane standards. There's only
one thing I'm missing.
How Can Into Mouse-Free?
I miss the Reddit Enhancement Suite, colloquially known as RES.
Navigating content and comment trees without dedicated keybindings is a
big slog relative to the obscene convenience and customizability of that
venerated plugin. I imagine that other users of the Old Reddit + RES
combo are in a similar position to my own. Now, there are
general-purpose keyboard integration layers for web browsers. I daily
use and highly recommend
Tridactyl, though it does have
a hell of a learning curve if you're not coming from the
Vim school of UX, and
it's Firefox only. I can't imagine Tridactyl being any more flexible
than it is, yet its intent as a general DOM parser means it can't really
compete with something native, explicitly designed for parsing content
lists and comment trees of embedded media.
I'd like to turn this over to the community. If you're familiar with the
Old Reddit + RES lifestyle, what were the essential features you'd like
to see implemented on top of the federated backend? If you're using
something to fill the void, tell us about it, regardless of how hacky or
specific it might be. If you love your mouse and don't see the issue
here, feel free to chime in.
Please note that this discussion is not intended as and should not
descend into a list of demands for Lemmy features. As I hope I've
already made clear, the ideal situation is a wide variety of different
applications connected together. Let's hack on stuff.
Haven't gotten much into navigating GUIs with a keyboard because mice are usually faster, but fixed layout things like lemmy would probably work well. The main reason I don't use vim or anything with vim bindings is that I use colemak-dh for a layout, which puts all the vim nav keys onto the right index finger, which makes them pretty much useless.
I'd definitely need proper remapping and key hints in the appropriate places to use lemmy with a keyboard.