Conkeror.app

I've been working professionally in the computer industry for slightly over a decade, now. Many of my fellow programmers have, at some point, dealt with RSI, or carpal tunnel. I've been fortunate enough to not have had those issues, but there have been times when I felt what may have been precursors to it.

I noticed that the times that I felt wrist pain where the times when I was using the mouse a lot. Consequently, I've tried creating an environment where I can minimize the time I have to spend navigating with a mouse.

My preferred development environment (for non iOS code) is Emacs. After so many years of spending most of my working day inside Emacs, the navigation keystrokes are deeply ingrained into my subconscious.

c-p, c-n, c-a, c-e, c-w, c-y... when I want to move the cursor around, these are the actions my fingers naturally follow. On a Mac, this is usually ok, since the bindings all work in terminal, and Mail.app, etc. But one area that doesn't really lend itself well to keyboard navigation is browsing the web.

Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera...none of them are really useable with a keyboard. Sure, you could remember a bunch of arcane shortcuts, but they are usually a) difficult to remember, b) hard to discover (not in the menu), or c) subject to change without notice (Firefox, I'm looking at you).

Enter Conkeror. Conkeror allows web browsing using only the keyboard for all the actions that would require a mouse in other browsers. It uses xulrunner (essentially the brains of Firefox), so it is fast and compliant, and it uses Emacs keybindings. It's the perfect solution to my problems.

Well, almost.

My personal machines are all Macs (go ahead and hate, if you want to...it's just Unix without all the configuration nightmares). Previously, getting Conkeror set up as a useable browser in Mac OS X was complicated and hacky. Then one day someone posted a script to the wiki that creates a compatible app bundle.

Now it's possible to use Conkeror as the default browser, and launch it with launchpad or spotlight...but it still had an ugly default icon.

So, I lifted an icon from wikimedia, converted it to something Mac compatible, and tweaked the bundle script to make it all easy-peasy.

You can get it here: conkeror_mac_bundler