There are practical reasons why one might be restricted to console apps---connecting remotely with no X forwarding, or perhaps being on a romantic computing date with a hopelessly ancient terminal. There are also reasons why one might need a mouse. Graphics or audio editing, games, some website layouts and many other applications call for the more analogue-ish input of a mouse.

Where does this leave software in the middle? Mail clients, web browsers, chat clients, file/directory browsers, PIM and calendar software are all types of application which could feasibly have a keyboard or mouse-based interface. Increasingly, applications are adding features which specifically require you to use the mouse. I come up against this all the time but to pick an easy example (all platforms are guilty here), OS X Finder only lets you move files by dragging with the mouse. Cut and paste was evidently too complicated for their target audience.

I'm a keyboard nut, so having to reach for my three-buttoned friend annoys me when I know that a little more work in the software would allow me to do the same thing more quickly with a quick jump from the home keys.

In my opinion graphical applications should have good support for both keyboard and mouse. I today finally caught up with Vimperator which is an addon for Firefox to make virtually all browsing functionality available directly from the keyboard using vim-like syntax. Firefox provides a good opportunity to try out different interface types with its interface being so heavily customisable using Javascript. With Vimperator, Firefox behaves exactly how I would like. I can still use a mouse when needed, and I can also do things quickly from the keyboard when my hands are there.

It took a third-party effort to get this functionality in place. Sadly I doubt that many application developers are going to put this level of thought into the keyboard interface. It is worthwhile adding that a keyboard interface is required for proper accessibility for some physically-disabled users.

I like modern software. Really. Am I so backwards to prefer pressing buttons which remain stationary on my desk?

This afternoon I fired it up and tried to use it to get my stuff done, and these are the results.

Web Browsing - Elinks is remarkably robust console web browser. The only issues I've had with it involve occasional full stops getting stuck on the display while scrolling, and on some systems it's disagreeable with encoding special characters for my terminal. The good bits are the tabbed browsing, CSS support, frames support and general ability to cope with websites which were definitely not designed with console users in mind.

Planning to keep on top of my usual routine I hit up Twitter and Facebook. Neither worked, which was unsurprising because both use lots of Javascript. It occurred to me to try their mobile versions, which are specially stripped down to work well on mobile phones: success!

Both Facebook mobile and Twitter mobile work perfectly in elinks, and I spent the afternoon following both using that method.

Online Chat - My mainstay of online communication, IRC, is already irssi in a screen session on another machine entirely so this was no problem to continue to use. For my instant messaging services I called upon finch, the console user interface to libpurple/pidgin. A quick read of the manpage revealed the important keyboard shortcuts and soon I was happily chatting to folk on MSN. Another success.

Music - Playing my music is something which causes me enough issues on my Macbook. iTunes is ridiculously limited with its file format support (yes I know about Xiph, I've tried it, it doesn't work properly) and has a rigid UI which disagrees with a fellow who favours the keyboard.

So here I am in keyboard-bound console Linux land -- what shall I use, but of course the excellent cmus? This marvellous program supports a bunch of formats as it comes packaged on Debian, including all of those in which my music is encoded: ogg, flac, mp3, wav and wma.

cmus is possibly the best music player I've ever used. Even as good as Amarok 1. It might not have the (slightly dodgy anyway) lyric-retrieving bling but it works reliably, has easy on-the-fly queuing, playlist support, customisable columns, easy to use incremental search, is fully controllably remotely using sockets, and plugs straight into ALSA. Beautiful.

Conclusion - Well that's all lovely but I still can't read my webcomics. It was also too hard to navigate the wordpress administrative interface to make this blog post in elinks. So I'm back on my mac (but cmus is still playing my music in the background!) The most interesting conclusion I've made is that we can expect a renaissance of text-based browsing for those harebrained enough, making use of the cut-down "mobile" pages offered by the popular websites.

Get in there and enjoy it.