phil ringnalda

Thanks to a pointer from someone whose identity was lost when I restarted Phoenix to enable the new extensions (oops), I’m now basking in true fullscreen, with no toolbars, courtesy of the Toolbox Autohide extension. Mouse down into the page itself, and the whole slug of toolbars and tab bar and menus disappears, throw the mouse back up at the top of the screen and they are back. As an extra bonus, with the Windows taskbar hidden too, I’m less like to get distracted since I don’t see the new mail icon or the clock in the system tray unless I hit the Windows key to bring it back up, and as a supreme double extra bonus there’s no great big “exit the whole browser losing twenty open tabs when you just meant to close the current tab” button on the end of the menu bar anymore, even when the menu bar is visible (instead it’s a little plain button at the end of the address and search bar). That’s going to save me several handfuls of hair every week.

Requiring considerably more time to get used to, but possibly even more useful, the Radial Context extension replaces the standard right-click menu with a pie menu (well, really a torus) of icons, four of which are direct contextual actions (right-click a link, and you have Copy Location, Save Target As, In New Window and In New Tab), and four are mouse gesture activated submenus: move the mouse their way rather than clicking them, and you get a new set of options (for example, the Tab submenu gives you options for New Tab, Close Tab, Next Tab and Previous Tab). With a bit of practice, I expect to be able to avoid the toolbar for most things other than bookmarklets, and since customizing the menus is just a matter of editing a Javascript file, I may not even need a toolbar for them. It gives you the same sort of feel of maximum control with very little movement that you get from mouse gestures, but while mouse gestures appeal to the same sort of people who think that memorizing three five hundred character commandline commands is somehow better than using a menu to open a dialog box, Radial Context is mouse gestures with a GUI – not only do you have icons rather than having to remember that “down-right-up” (or whatever it may be) opens a link in a new tab, but if you hesitate for a second, you also have tooltips to remind you that a white rectangle with a blue dot in one corner means “page submenu.”

And speaking of space, I finally got around to editing /mt/styles.css to change the width value in textarea.width500 from 486 to 686, so that my editing textareas aren’t nasty little narrow things that won’t even fit a reasonably long link without horizontal scrolling, and while I was at it I edited /mt/tmpl/cms/edit_entry.tmpl to move the excerpt textarea up above then entry textarea, where I’ll be less likely to forget about it and let autogenerated excerpts sneak into my RSS and TrackBack pings. Having sort-of-understandable templates that create the whole UI for the program is really a very powerful feature: shame I let the fact that opening files with a .tmpl extension via FTP killed the (rather older) version of HTML-Kit that I’ve been using stop me from shuffling things around to suit me.