Browser shortcut keys for placing focus on arbitrary input controls

Question

When surfing the web, I often find myself having to reach for the mouse to place focus on a particular input control. For example, I might need to click in a text box to enter my log-in information. For reasons of efficiency I would prefer to minimise such mouse usage.

I am aware that one can usually use the 'Tab' key to cycle between such controls, but usually there's a whole bunch of header links that one has to navigate before reaching the control of interest. I'm also aware that some applications (eg Gmail) have built-in shortcut keys, however I'm looking for something that will work on generic HTML pages.

Usually, once the first control in a form has focus, it's easy to 'Tab' between the remaining controls in that form before submitting it.

My question: Assuming I'm using Firefox (24.0), is there an existing add-on which will speed up (using keyboard shortcuts) the task of setting focus to an arbitrary input control on the page (eg the first text box in a form)?

I imagine that such an add-on would listen for a certain key combination eg 'Ctrl-Shift-F', upon which it would display tooltip-like information on each visible input control which specifies the subsequent key (eg 'a', 'b', 'c' etc) that will cause the corresponding control/link to be focused.

Does anybody know of such an add-on, or am I perhaps looking at this problem the wrong way?

Answer 1

I found two extensions:

• Fox Input
• Cycle Input Focus

I've only tried Fox Input, but it's working for me so far. It defaults to Alt-I to move forward through text fields and Alt-J to move backwards, but you can change the hotkeys in the prefs.

I also use VimFX , which can do a tooltip-style selection of links and text fields, but its other features might be overkill for your problem.