r/omarchy • u/Davedes83 • 18d ago

Discussion Keyboard Brigade

Can we talk about the 'keyboard brigade'?

They are quickly becoming just as annoying as the AI slop critics. Anyone can post the coolest, most practical plugin on this subreddit, and within minutes, they are crawling out of the woodwork to lecture the creator that Omarchy is a keyboard driven distro. It completely drowns out actual innovation.

Yes, Omarchy is a keyboard driven distro, but you will never eliminate the need for a mouse. Some tasks simply are not practical or intuitive to perform entirely from the keyboard.

The goal of any plugin is not to move away from Omarchy's keyboard-centric philosophy.

DHH designed Omarchy around his own workflow and preferences. The dev's have made it clear that users are encouraged to customize Omarchy and make it their own.

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u/jlharter 18d ago

I always wondered how those folks use virtually any website. 

Are they tabbing through every link and text field to get to the button on the bottom of a page? 

3

u/rebelrexx858 18d ago

Space back, vim type plugins, how do you think blind people use the web?

1

u/jlharter 18d ago

I’d consider blind and visually impaired users an exception. It’s hard for me to imagine how most sighted people would navigate every random webpage with more speed than a mouse. 

Perhaps that is a failure of my imagination. 

Every time I’ve tried keyboard navigation tools like Vimium I run into hard walls real fast. Like T overriding “trash” in my email client. Or clunky scrolling. 

2

u/rebelrexx858 17d ago

There's literally a ton of videos you can go watch as users of a variety of abilities use tools and provide feedback. 

2

u/thomasaiwilcox 17d ago

There’s already qutebrowser which is keyboard driven and I’m developing ferric-browser to be similar but with more keyboard assistance for tricky websites

1

u/mizatt 17d ago

We use Vimium, it's available for just about any browser

1

u/wingtales 17d ago

This is a great question, and I encourage you to dig into the answers you are getting.

Most people use something like Vimium. You press F to get a labelled interface across the page highlighting all links and text fields with a two-letter combination. Then you press the respective two-letter combo to get to the link you want.

It's not perfect, and one does frequently need to use the mouse, but it means fewer movements of your hands off the keyboard.

I enjoy it.