Whoo yeah I’m excited!
About two months ago I got a new Apple Macbook Pro. I love it, it’s rad, I love using it etc. But something that’s been bugging me no end is that I don’t know the shortcut key to jump to the address bar (where you type http://…etc) in Firefox. In Windows you just do Alt-D and you’re there, I think that works in Linux as well, but on OS X it’s no go.
Well, I’ve just found out the shortcut keys for not only the address bar, but the search bar as well (and also in Thunderbird!):
- jump into the search bar in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird
- Cmd-K (Mac), Ctrl-K (Windows)
- jump into the address bar in Mozilla Firefox
- Cmd-L (Mac), Ctrl-L (Windows)
Mozilla.org has more juicy keyboard shortcuts.
This is super good news because now I can use basically the same key combo on Windows and on OS X. My life just gets better and better, friends.
Something else that’s kinda annoying about Thunderbird is that it’s not GMail. I love GMail and all my mail goes through it so that:
- tons of spam gets filtered out by GMail’s awesome spam filtering
- I can access a copy of all of my mail from anywhere on the internet (except work who block GMail…argh)
But not only does my mail all go through GMail, I download it all via POP3 to my Thunderbird mail client. This is because:
- I then have a backup copy of all my email on my own computer and am not just trusting Google to never go broke/lose my mail/start charging me to access it/something else unforeseen
- I can access my email when I’m offline, eg on a plane or a train or whatever
But as I was saying, Thunderbird is not GMail and despite being a proper rich, fat-client desktop application, it doesn’t have the great shortcut keys that make GMail so quick to navigate and move messages around. Plus it doesn’t have that whole “archive and forget, then search later” philosophy, it has the old-school “carefully choose category-based folders for your messages and then take forever to find them later” philosophy, which is so 1998 and lame 
But what I’m getting at is that now thanks to GMailUI Thunderbird works like GMail, adding j,k and other shortcut keys to navigate messages as well as a really cool “Expression” search mode that lets you search just like you do in GMail.
As I said, my life just gets better and better.