Firefox Tip: Lightning Fast Highlighting.
Posted by Jon Lee in Efficiency, tags: add-ons, Efficiency, firefox, vim
Firefox offers some nice features when it comes to highlighting text. These tips aren’t exclusive to Firefox only and I’m not sure if it works on all platforms (I recall being frustrated that something wasn’t as it should in Firefox on Ubuntu) but give some of these tips a try:
Single click on URL or Search Box
This will highlight the entire field (but I’m sure you know this already).
Double clicking a word
Double clicking a word will highlight that word. It also highlights the space immediately after the word which you may or may not find annoying. Personally, I don’t like this because I often like to highlight words to link and having the link extend an extra space past the word just doesn’t look nice. Fortunately, you can turn off this feature by editing a variable in your Firefox configuration. Simply type about:config in your address bar and change the following variable from true to false:
layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word
Firefox is also smart enough to highlight “words” that aren’t separated by spaces. It treats periods, dashes, hyphens, quotes and backslashes as word separators as well. For example, if you double click on the “jonlee” part of the domain name, it will only highlight “jonlee” even though it isn’t separated from the rest of the URL by spaces.
You can choose whether or not to include punctuation when highlighting a word by changing this variable:
layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation
Double clicking a space
To highlight two words at once, simply double click the space between them! This is another favorite way of mine to select text to link.
Triple clicking
A triple click will highlight an entire line. Nuff said.
Turn on Cursor Key Navigation
By turning on cursor key navigation, you get your trusty blinking cursor that you can use to navigate with.
Now you can use your years of Word highlighting skills in your browser complete with all Home, End, PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl and/or Shift combinations!
Go Vim style
If you’re feeling old school, you can install the Vimperator add-on to give your browser a Vim-like interface. I’ll let you try this one on your own.
Got any more tips for highlighting? Leave a comment!
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