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my Notion keybindings

If you haven't tried Notion yet, you should. It is the only tiled and tabbed window manager that truly works well.

The default keyboard shortcuts aren't the best however, and they aren't easy to remember either. I have been using Notion for 15 years now, and I wouldn't know how to do it any better.

  • The mod key is the windows key.
  • F2 opens Urxvt, F3 any command. Middle mouse click the window frame for a menu, or press F12.
  • C closes the window, add shift to kill.
  • Z/X are for switching workspaces "left/right". Add shift and you switch monitors instead.
  • WASD are for frame navigation. Add shift to split the frame in that direction and the cursor is placed in the new frame.
  • Q to tag frame, E to attach the tagged frame.
  • Tab cycles through frame tabs, with shift backwards.
  • R to resize (with arrow keys). Hold shift before to shrink.
  • Return is fullscreen, space is float window, space shift nudge, grave ( ` ) is scratchpad.
  • F10 Go to window, F8 disables Notion keybindings, F1 suspend.

Most things can be done with only the left hand (for normal use) and all vital things even with only the mouse (for watching Youtube on couch while eating). Things are easy to remember as they work akin to known shortcut configurations, like WASD for directional keys, Mod + enter for fullscreen or Mod + tab to cycle tabs. Or if its not clunky they work by abbreviation (C for close, R for resize), or spacial symmetries (Q -> E for tag -> attach sits atop of WASD, Z/X for left/right below WASD).

Files for Download:

keyboard_reference.html (interactive version)
notion_cfg.tar.gz

 

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multi-row tabs in Firefox Quantum

After Mozilla killed virtually all the plugins with Firefox Quantum 3 years back, the browser became almost completely useless and unusable. This was part of a new support scheme that targets only the main bulk of unskilled and largely inactive users, while totally neglecting the rest. Something similar happened to Android's Firefox Fennec just a month ago or so, when it got replaced by Fenix, although that situation seems to be a lot worse. Since Quantum I started using Palemoon (pre-Quantum fork). And I just installed Fennec from F-Droid. Compared to Firefox, Palemoon is only barely if at all developed and maintained. At least it works though.

It would be great if you could switch back to Firefox, but does Quantum work well enough?

By now after 3 years, I guess there are plenty of replacement plugins to restore basic functionality. But one thing I had never imagined to make a return, were multi-row tabs!

In fact the entire UI now seems to be customizable with CSS!

From here you can use this file.

And just put it into your profile directory like this:

~/.mozilla/firefox/horp5zpu.default/chrome/userChrome.css

Here is my file (better size limits):

userChrome.css:

 

Unrelated to multi-row tabs, I still found a couple of not-so-trivial bugs in Firefox Quantum. Like context menus opening in the wrong place. So its still not good enough to switch to. But otherwise, it seemed to be working. With the new abandon style support scheme though, you probably can't really count on anything anymore.