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.

  • CannotSleep420English
    5·
    1 year ago

    While not quite what you’re talking about, some keyboard shortcuts for the markdown textareas used by posts and comments were merged recently.

  • nottheengineer@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.