Control your entire computer with the keyboard

I developed this set of solutions after a couple of weeks of suffering hand and arm pain due to work. I spent 8+ hours a day in front of my computer, so the combination of arm movement between the trackpad and keyboard, and the trackpad (later mouse) itself were provoking me a lot of inflammation related pain. A week of only using the keyboard, and it was gone!

Something like this is great for people with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome or related ailments, I can vouch for it. If you need help setting it up, just say so in the comments, and I'll do my best to help.

Google Chrome

It's all about cVim, Vim for Chrome.

My favorite features:

• j/k to move up/down, d/u for page up/down, gg for top of the page, G for bottom
• :pintab to pin tabs with the keyboard (finally!)
• f to follow links,
• F to follow them on a new page,
• gy to copy a link's URL to the keyboard
• / to find text, v to select and copy it
• .cvimrc to re-enable keyboard shortcuts in sites like twitter, github, and others, and make it compatible with JK Navigator. Here's mine, still tweaking it though.

Mac OS X

• Enable cycling between all controls with Tab:
  
• Use Caps Lock for Escape when pressed alone or Control when pressed with another key. Here's a great writeup on this using Karabiner, which also lets you increase the key repeat, and other fancy keyboard-related stuff.
• Alfred, better Spotlight.
• Homebrew Cask, to install apps with the command line. No more go-to-webpage-download-dmg-mount-drag-open nonsense.
• Grid, window manager. Move windows around and between monitors:
  
  
  
  
  Here's it working with my two screens. PD: It's unsupported software though, not available online anymore. If you want the .dmg, just ask :)
• Shortcat, use the keyboard to click anything on the screen in Mac OS X.
  

Atom editor

Plenty of shortcuts out-of-the-box, the ones I use the most:

• ⇧ + ⌥ + K: Delete line
• ⌘ + D: "Magic" selector, just like Sublime Text:
  
  
• ⌘ + L: Select line
• Ctrl + ⌘ + Up/Down: Move line(s) up and down
• ⌘ + Z,Y: Go back to where I was (hacky, but works!)

Slack

I'm using the web version now, it feels as performant as the native one (which seems to use node-webkit or something like that), and I can use all the cvim shortcuts. The only change I've had to get used to is using ⌘ + K instead of ⌘ + T to switch between chats.

iTerm

Readline all the way! Lots of command line utilities use it or mimic it, they even work in places like Chrome's omnibar. This are the ones I abuse the most:

• Ctrl + A: Go to start of line
• Ctrl + E: Go to end of line
• Ctrl + U: Kill line
• ⌥ + D: Delete word in front of the cursor
• Ctrl + P / Ctrl + N: Navigate history
• ⌘ + Up: Scroll up one line
• ⌘ + Down: Scroll down one line
• Fn + ⌘ + Up: Page Up
• Fn + ⌘ + Down: Page Down

To use Ctrl + P / Ctrl + N I put this on my .zshrc:

  bindkey '^P' up-history
  bindkey '^N' down-history

Pending work (comment if you know how to fix these things please!)

Chrome tab-hell: After doing ⌘ + L to focus the omnibar, I can't find a way to focus the tab's content without tabbing through all the extension buttons.

Gmail: It has too many keyboard shortcuts to ignore them in the .cvimrc, but by itself I can't click on links easily.

Move tabs around in Chrome and Atom: Can be done in iTerm with ⌘ + ⇧ + Left/Right, but can't find a way to do it anywhere else.

Most of all,

Every time you find yourself reaching for it, think again—there's surely a better way without it, you just haven't discovered it yet.