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Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips

Artem Russakovskii — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:32:00 +0000

Introduction

In this article I’m going to discuss a number of useful Firefox extensions and tips. This list is not a “COMPLETE GUIDE TO FIREFOX!!!111!” but a collection of some, albeit many, extensions and techniques I find useful, with detailed descriptions and illustrations. I try to make my reviews as personal as possible and express my own points of view, so I will not be using any boring official descriptions altogether. Short, concise, and useful – that is my goal.

Right now I use 53 extensions in total. If you think that’s a lot, you might be right. However, because Firefox is so mature and new extensions come out every day, it is not as crazy of a number as it was 2 years ago. Firefox gets faster, I download more extensions, and the end result is I’m happier as a user because Firefox suddenly provides me with a lot more features at approximately the same running speed. I plan on continuing to increase this number.

Note that if you have a limited amount of RAM, installing so many extensions might start overflowing the memory and will significantly slow down the system if you run out of it.

Here’s a quick slightly obsolete screenshot of the extensions I’m using:

Firefox Tips

Before describing extensions, I wanted to mention a few tips about Firefox itself. If you are interested in extensions, proceed to part 2 right away, however I urge you to read these too.

Using the bookmarks bar and shortened names

You can fit a lot of quick bookmarks on the little bookmark bar if you shorten the names to 1 or 2 characters.

Using keywords for bookmarks

A little less known trick is to use the keywords property of your bookmarks. For example, here I assign a keyword ‘d’ to my digg.com bookmark. Then I can just go to the url bar, type in ‘d’, Enter and voila – digg starts loading.

Protecting and locking tabs

Protect a tab will prevent you from closing it.

I use this functionality on my most frequently visited sites – so frequently that I never want to close them. They include the iGoogle homepage, Google calendar, Remember The Milk TODO list, my Trac tickets at work, and a few other things.

These protected states are saved even if you close and open Firefox (but unfortunately, not if you use QuickRestart described in part 2). Protected windows are marked by a symbol.

You can protect a tab by Shift-clicking on it and lock it by Alt-clicking (these are customizable in Tab Mix Plus settings)

Locking a tab is similar, but instead of not being able to close it, you are not able to change the url. Any url change attempts will produce a new tab. I personally never use this feature but some may find it handy. Locked windows are marked by a symbol.

Note that you need the Tab Mix Plus extension (described in part 2) for these tricks.

Restoring sessions

While Firefox 3 now has a built-in session restore feature, it’s not very robust. That is why I still use the Tab Mix Plus (described in part 2) session restore feature set. TMP’s session manager remembers protect and lock statuses, tab history, selected tab, and everything else about the session. I will describe TMP in more detail later.

Using keyboard shortcuts

In my experience, keyboard shortcuts are primarily used by power users, while the rest of the population uses a mouse. However, shortcuts are immensely effective time savers and, if you mouse a lot, will provide a relief for your wrist. Let’s take a look at a few easy and important ones.

Ctrl-L and TABs

Ctrl-L will put the focus on the url bar, no matter where you are on the page. It is equivalent to F6 in IE, except it’s actually robust. So, when I’m ready to type in the name of the site, my fingers are already on the keyboard. Ctrl-L doesn’t even require extra movements.

TAB (the key, not the Firefox tab) once after you’ve pressed Ctrl-L and you’re in the Firefox search bar (the one I set to imdb a bit later in the article). TAB twice and you’re in the Google toolbar, if you have it installed.

Ctrl-Enter and Shift-Enter

Ctrl-Enter is a tremendous time saver. It appends “.com” to whatever you have in the url bar and prepends “http://www.”. Type in “google”, press Ctrl-Enter, and voila, you’re at www.google.com. Similarly, Shift-Enter, appends “.net”.

Ctrl-T

Ctrl-T opens a new tab.

Ctrl-Shift-T

Ctrl-Shift-T opens the last closed tab(s), in the order they were closed.

Ctrl-Alt-T

Ctrl-Alt-T duplicates the current tab. Yet again, this is a feature of Tab Mix Plus (described in part 2). Oh how much I love you, TMP.

Ctrl-TAB, Ctrl-Shift-TAB

Ctrl-TAB is probably the most frequently used key combination. It cycles between tabs forward while Ctrl-Shift-TAB does it backwards.

Ctrl-W

Ctrl-W closes the current tab.

Space

Pressing space is a quick way to scroll down one page. It’s a lot of times more convenient than finding the small PgDn button, especially if you have fat fingers.

Setting the Firefox search bar to IMDB

Because I already use the Google Toolbar (one of the most useful toolbars out there) there is little point keeping Firefox’s default search box set to Google. I prefer IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase) myself but you can easily set it to another search engine.

End of Part 1

This marks the end of part 1 in the series. Proceed to part 2.

Mastering The Linux Shell – Bash Shortcuts Explained (Now With Cheat Sheets)

Artem Russakovskii — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:46:05 +0000

During my day-to-day activities, I use the Bash shell a lot. My #1 policy is to optimize the most frequently used activities as much as possible, so I’ve compiled these handy bash shortcuts and hints (tested in SecureCRT on Windows and Konsole on Linux). The article only touches on the default bash mode – emacs, not vi. If you haven’t specifically assigned your shell mode to vi (set –o vi), you’re almost certainly using the emacs mode. Learn these and your shell productivity will skyrocket, I guarantee it.

Update #1: In response to a few people saying this list is too short and “[he] could've added something to it, to atleast make it look longer” (quote from one of Stumbleupon reviewers), I want to clarify something. I deliberately did not include every single bash shortcut there is. I included what I personally thought were the best and most useful commands. I did not want to make the list too cluttered and wanted the cheat sheet to fit on one page without going to a smaller font size.

Download Version 1.3 (03/22/12):

Bash.Shortcuts.pdf for Adobe Acrobat (305.8 kB) downloaded 7319 times
Bash.Shortcuts.docx for Word 2007+ (22.5 kB) downloaded 2736 times
Bash.Shortcuts.doc for Word 97-2003 (52.5 kB) downloaded 1928 times

And, for quick reference, here's the ugly html version:

Keyboard shortcut	Action
Navigation
Ctrl-A	Go to the beginning of the line (note that if you use GNU screen, you can use the Home button to do this, especially considering that Ctrl-A is a special control character in screen).
Ctrl-E	Go to the end of the line (note that if you use GNU screen, you can use the End button to do this).
Alt-B (or ESC, left arrow)	Jump back one word using a non-alphanumeric character as delimiter.
Alt-F (or ESC, right arrow)	Jump forward one word using a non-alphanumeric character as delimiter.
Ctrl-PGUP or Shift-PGUP	This may or may not work, and it works differently on different console apps. It will either scroll up one line at a time, 1 page at a time, or it may not work at all. I'm inclined to think it's not a bash shortcut at all.
Ctrl-PGDN or Shift-PGDN	Same as the above but scrolling is done in the opposite direction.
Up/Down	Previous/Next command in history. This one is way too obvious but I'm including it for completeness.
Ctrl-R	History search. For example, Ctrl-R svn Ctrl-R Ctrl-R … will cycle through all recently run commands with the ‘svn’ in them. It is one of the most useful shortcuts in bash.
Ctrl-O	Takes whatever line was after the line you selected with Ctrl-R and makes it your next command.
Command Line Manipulation
Ctrl-W	Cut one word backwards using white space as delimiter.
Alt-BACKSPACE	Cut one word backwards using a non-alphanumeric character as delimiter (different from Ctrl-W, for example, abc;bcd will cut to abc;).
Ctrl-K	Cut everything forward to end of line.
Ctrl-U	Cut everything backwards to beginning of line.
Ctrl-T	Transpose the current character with the previous one. I almost never use this. Never mind, I never use it, but someone might find it useful.
Alt-T	Transpose the word at cursor with the one before cursor. In other words, swap them around.
Ctrl-Y	Paste whatever was cut by the last cut command.
Ctrl-V	Insert the next character literally. For example, Ctrl-V TAB inserts the actual TAB character. This shortcut is often misunderstood because of mistyping Ctrl-V and not realizing what it does.
Ctrl-_	Undo the last command. Don’t forget – it’s Ctrl-Shift-MINUS, not Ctrl-MINUS.
Alt-R	Revert all changes to current line. Very useful if you accidentally modify a command in history.
Alt-U/Alt-L/Alt-C	Uppercase/lowercase/capitalize from cursor to end of word and move cursor past end of word.
Terminal control
Ctrl-L	Clear screen while keeping whatever is already typed in the command line intact.
Ctrl-S	Suspend currently running terminal.
Ctrl-Q	Unsuspend the terminal suspended by Ctrl-S. You need to be aware of this shortcut because 99% of the time you’ve accidentally pressed Ctrl-S and need to undo its effects.
Ctrl-Z	Suspend the currently running process (usually followed by bg to resume it in the background or fg to resume in the foreground).
TAB	Autocomplete. Start typing, then hit TAB. You will either get a list of possible completion values (2 TABs needed) or the only choice will be filled in (only 1 TAB is needed). This shortcut is quite obvious and well known, so I put it at the bottom of the list.

Tip: By the way, as duly noted in the comments, all of these tricks work on the mysql command line, so you can, for example, ctrl-R through your previously executed mysql commands.

Hope you guys will find this list helpful. I think it is relatively complete, but feel free to add any omissions.

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Some Useful vim Commands – My vim Cheatsheet

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:07:24 +0000

[WORK IN PROGRESS] Here is a list of commands that I use every day with vim, in no particular order. Out of a billion possible key combinations, I found these to be irreplaceable and simple enough to remember.

*	search for the word under cursor (to the end of the file)
#	search for the word under cursor (to the top of the file)
ctrl-p,ctrl-n	suggest (p)revious or (n)ext autocomplete from the list of existing keywords in the file or included files (!).
:go NNN	go to byte NNN
.	redo last command
/SEARCH TERM	search document for SEARCH TERM
:%s/FOO/BAR/gci	replace FOO with BAR (g)lobally, case (i)insensitively, and asking for (c)onfirmation
n (N)	next (previous) search result
%	find and jump to a matching brace or parenthesis
u	undo
ctrl-r	redo
r CHAR	replace character under curson with CHAR
i	start editing before current character
I	start editing in the beginning of current line
a	start editing after current character
A	start editing at the end of current line
o	start editing on the next line
O	start editing on the previous line
:wq or ZZ	write file and exit
ctrl-v	visual block select (rectangular)
shift-v	visual line select
ctrl(or shift)-v y or d	copy or delete selected text
yy	yank (copy) current line
yNNN arrow up/down	yank NNN lines above or below
p	paste the yanked buffer
cw	change word (delete word under cursor and go into edit mode)
cNw	change N words
e!	reload the file (revert)