jk navigation

What unites these services? Easy navigation with the 'j' and 'k' keys.

Recently, Pamela Fox (an employee of Google, a specialist in relations with developers) on her twitter gave advice that the space bar in Google Wave translates into an unread blip. I asked her if she had any plans for entering jk-navigation, to which she replied that she did not know what kind of navigation it was. Pamela is a great geek. To some extent, thanks to her posts on technical forums, the Google Maps API has become popular among developers. This episode convinced that it makes sense to talk about such convenient additional functionality in geek communities.
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This navigation is present in the mail, and in the reader from Google. jjjjj - so convenient to run through the tape reader. And to clean the mail using the keyboard for me is much nicer and more efficient than using the mouse. There are many other convenient keyboard shortcuts in both services, which can be found by pressing the '?'.

At one time, the elegant use of jk-navigation I really liked when ffffound.com service . Click on the 'j' and jump to the next picture, and if on the last picture on the page, then the next page. Very convenient: the focus is not lost, as when the pictures are scrolled in a continuous stream.

Apparently, not only this approach inspired me. Ryan Singer from 37signals is very good about him in the company's blog . And Matthew Hutchinson laid out on the github javascript library where this navigation is implemented (prototype was originally used, and now jquery).

The hjkl keys in the vim text editor are used as arrows. In web services, 'h' and 'l' can be used to scroll through pages or for other purposes. In the recent mini-project toptuby.appspot.com, I wanted to quickly flip through the videos that tweetersphere says and jk-navigation there turned out to be very useful. On 'h' and 'l' I screwed the video back and forth.

Of course, you can add navigation using the hjkl keys to browsers using extensions. I used to put it on Firefox in my time, and although I’m a vim fan, it didn’t stick because it didn’t add convenience. After all, the main essence of ffffound-like navigation in jumping from one logical block to another. Such blocks on different sites can be defined by different HTML elements. And it is better that site creators embed hopping with the help of keys, even if not 'j' and 'k'.

For example, in the Russian Internet, Artemy Lebedev is actively promoting control navigation. It is similar, but people embodying it focus on moving from page to page, rather than the logical elements inside. But it would be more pleasant to watch travel photos of Artemy (for example, in Ukraine ) if Ctrl + ↓ would transfer to the beginning of the next block with a comment and a photo.

In JavaScript, Habr has hints that jk-navigation is available, but at the time of this writing, it was not working correctly. A few days after writing this article, kapustos presented the Greasmonkey script for keyboard navigation on the best comments on Habré. Works in Firefox, Opera and Beta Chrome.

History reference:

Apparently, vi (vim, gvim) took over the hjkl-navigation from one of the first personal terminals ADM-3A . There on the layout were the arrows on these keys ( see layout ). There are many other options for matching arrows and keys.

Sites using jk-navigation (add in comments):

ffffound.com
gmail.com
www.google.com/reader
toptuby.appspot.com

brizzly.com
9gag.com
www.boston.com/bigpicture
for example, www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/12/the_decade_in_news_photographs.html