by Longtime readers of the Mac Gems column know that I’m a keyboard person. With few exceptions, I prefer to keep my fingers on the keyboard and off my mouse, trackpad, or trackball—sticking to the keyboard is better ergonomically, and it’s often faster, as well.
But there’s one app where it’s been difficult for me to go keyboard-only: my Web browser. There’s no easy—or fast—way to use the keyboard to navigate websites, open links, and the like. OS X includes some special accessibility features that let you use the keyboard for these tasks, but those features were designed with accessibility, not productivity, in mind.
So I was happy to discover Vimari, an extension for Safari, based on the nifty Vimium extension for Chrome, that lets you open links and more using the keyboard. (Vimari is much more limited than Vimium, focusing on links; Vimium provides a slew of additional navigation shortcuts.)
Vimari gives every link a keyboard shortcut.
Once you’ve installed the Vimari extension in Safari, pressing Vimari’s Link Hint shortcut (by default, Control+F) places a two-letter keyboard shortcut, highlighted in yellow, over every link on the current webpage. Shortcuts for links in particular areas of the screen tend to start with the same letter: For example, as you can see in the screenshot to the right, links in the navigation bar at the top of the webpage have shortcuts beginning with D; shortcuts for links in the middle of the page start with K.
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