Protocol 80 Productivity Blog

I’m on a new upsurge of blogging right now, doing lots of posts, and more comments in other places. It’s easy to see I’ve had surges of posting in the past, but they fizzle out, so I am making a marked effort this time to keep the flow of output.

There are a few things I’ve done this time I haven’t done in the past to keep me going. Continue Reading »

A quick and easy trick for speeding up your browsing to regularly viewed sites in Firefox which I find myself using more and more.

Once you have a page bookmarked, right click it and select “Properties” and you will see a “keyword” text box, with this you can simply enter the keyword into the URL field and jump right to the bookmarked page without having to move your hands away from the keyboard, or hunt around in your bookmarks for the link you want.

So for example, I can now quickly jump to my GMail account by tapping Ctrl+t to open a new tab, which automatically puts the url in focus, and then just type “gm” and hit enter. To use the current tab, Ctrl+l will jump you right into the address bar.

For a more complete list of Firefox short cuts, there is a cheat sheet provided by Leslie Franke which has been praised frequently.

I just had a quick play with “GTD with Vim” a seemingly nifty little plug-in that adds some Getting Things Done type functionality into your Vim client.

Now, it’s a neat little plug in that offers some swift keyboard short cuts (and a menu) for adding actions as a line and some syntax highlighting to make it easy to read when you tag it as a project or add a context. But it just seems a little limiting to me, mostly in the way to review the data once it’s in. My Vim-Fu is a little lacking, so maybe there are some short cuts I’m missing, and the formatting falls back neatly to been filtered though “grep” or other text processing tool, but that means leaving it to another application.

Edit: After a bit of further investigation, I discovered that it automatically reorders lines by project name, and then by context, and keeps finished items at the bottom, so no option, just magic that wasn’t immediately obvious as none of my tests cases overlapped.

Still, if you live your life in Vim clients it might be what you need to give you that little bit of an edge. It did make me take another look at the way Vim can be extend in other areas however, and so a worthwhile effort even if not for me right now.