Firefox for Keyboard Hackers..

As a long time Linux user I use keyboard for everything (And yes I use emacs). But the one of the painful areas is web browsing. Where keyboard usage always been minimal. I figured there must be something which will allow me to lose the mouse. I started looking for options, and there are few great tools already available.

• Conkeror : This is a great browser based on webrunner. It allows you to use emacs keyboard bindings for browsing. But the only problem with it is that it doesn’t play nice with many firefox extensions. Other than that it is a great project.
• Vimperator: This a great tool if you know vi bindings. As I was emacs user it took me a while to get used to the vi bindings, but after that it was a smooth ride. This is actually just an firefox extension. So you still use firefox along with the other extensions you might need/require. If you want to extend this browsing experiance you can take a look at yubnub.org which gives you some shortcuts for the web, so just set yubnub as your default search engine and you are good to go (Eg. if you need to google some thing just type :o g <topic>) This makes web really fast. Vimperator is easily extensible using scripts. Many of them are already available at the vimperator site.

Yes future seems to be bright for keyboard lovers as even Mozilla is working on a addon to extend firefox  called ubiquity which provides you commandline-like interface (I like the idea of ubiquity but I needed something which gives me total control over the browser like vimperator). I just hope to see something like this for chrome too, which is an another great browser. (There is an another new browser based on webkit and can be configure to have  vim-like or emacs-like bindings named Uzbl, but this is still under development.) So at the moment I have finalized on vimperator. If you have any tricks/tips for vimperator or you know a better tool, please do let me know.

Firefox extensions which make my life easier!

I have seen many posts out there about the Best firefox extensions or Top firefox extensions. This post is about not about `which extensions to use` but about some of the extensions i use. And which make my life easy so here it goes..

1) Google Browser Sync :- Now this is one great extension which is not mentioned in that detail. Well this is for people who will like to use their google account to keep track of their bookmarks (passwords, tabs.). Now this really helps if you are using more than one computers everyday. It Can keep everything encrypted.

2) Session Manager :- This extension is really useful for the people who just tired of firefox crashes. I know firefox has restore session option, but this can store the history for every tab too. So I dont have to bother to find anything in history, and just pick up where I left off.

3) Google toolbar :- I know this sounds awkward. I mean that toolbar is mostly useless. Well I have a solution for that, I don’t use it. That’s right I don’t use the toolbar itself. But this enables the recent feature Google Web History. Which can keep track of all your visits. This can save lot of pain sometimes.

4) Hint-a-Hint :- This extension is my favorite. It shows keyboard hints. It saves me from using that stupid mouse. Warning: Don’t ever use this on a page which has too many links (like www.popurls.com For eg.). There is a another project by Mozilla called as conkeror which turns firefox into a emacs like web browser. I really liked it but didn’t find it practical enough (If you use lot of extensions you might get into trouble with this).

5) Adblock Plus :- Well this is been one of the most popular extension for months. So don’t have to say anything about it I guess. Don’t forget to use the Filterset.G updater with this.

6) Firebug and Web developer :- These two extensions are an amazing display of what extensions can do. I am too lazy to write about these two, as they are very powerful and feature rich. You can find out more about them at the given websites.

7) Customizegoogle :- Hate those ads on google? want to improve security? want links to other sites on google? Well then this is the extension for you..
Greasemonkey and Stylish :- I think most of you will know about Greasemonkey but not stylish. Well stylish lets you customize css i.e. styles for various sites. You can find a long list of all the available styles at userstyles.org

8 ) asdf-jkl :- I heard about this extension on a lifehacker post. It can show the short cut to various things in your firefox as tooltips. Very useful if you are tried of using mouse and too lazy to remember the short cuts..

9) Open in Browser :- This extension allows you to open various documents directly in browser. This is truly useful if you come across various shell scripts or any other scripts for that matter.

I will go on editing this list if I find any new interesting extensions. If you know about one let me know.

Backup Gmail with getmail!

The first question you will ask is why? Well there are few users who lost all the their mails because of some bug. You can find the details about that here. And the second reason is I am too paranoid. :P

Backing up is very easy as gmail offers you a pop access to it’s service. So you can use any pop client, I chose getmail (getmail is written in python, you can even run it on windows with Cygwin). Reason being it gives you a lot more flexibility than Fetchmail. Now you just have to enable pop access for your gmail account for all mail (IMP: Let it keep the mail in your gmail account after you access it from pop, to be on the safer side.) and let getmail do it’s magic. Configuring getmail is quite easy. All you have to do is create a file called getmailrc in ~/.getmail/. Put the following contents in that.

[options]
verbose = 0
delete = false
message_log = ~/.getmail/log

[retriever]
type = SimplePOP3SSLRetriever
server = pop.gmail.com
username = gmailusername@gmail.com
[destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = ~localusername/backup/gmailMbox
user = localusername

Note :- You can also keep your password in this file so you can just a run a cron job. But like I said I am too paranoid to do that. :)

Also /home/localusername/backup/gmailMbox file should created before running get mail, as getmail doesn’t create it for you.
Now you can run getmail via command line Or put it in a user cron.

$getmail -l

It will ask you for a password, If you have not entered your password in the getmailrc. (If you have large no. of mails in your account you may not able be able to get all of it in one go. More information here.)