As an avid keyboarder, one thing that has always slowed me down is having to move my hands to reach for the navigation keys (arrow keys, home, end, page up/down, etc.). Methods to reduce the problem are available (for instance, space bar scrolling in browsers, special navigation modes in editors like vi/vim, etc.), but they are all application-specific. I’ve always wished for a vim-style navigation capability that worked everywhere in Windows.

Rare Pebble Software has created an ingenious solution to this problem: TouchCursor is a simple Windows application that turns your Space bar into another shift-state key, allowing you to combine it with home row keys for navigation and other common keystrokes.

For instance, by default Space+J is bound to left arrow, Space+L to right arrow, Space+K to down, Space+I to up, etc. Regular shift states (Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Win) can be combined with Space to type almost any combination from the home row. It sounds a bit odd, but it works surprisingly well. Note that it does work differently than a separate mode (ala vim).

The key bindings can be customized as desired. I like the defaults that are provided for the right hand, and I’ve also added bindings for other hard-to-reach keys like Esc and the function keys. Now my hands hardly ever need to leave their home positions.

A training mode is provided, and it only takes a few days to get into the habit of using the TouchCursor key combinations. TouchCursor is also a boon for use on laptops, which tend to have funky layouts for the navigation keys.

It even works inside Remote Desktop sessions and guest virtual machines (Virtual PC and VMware) without having to install it on the remote/guest systems!

Once you start using it, you’ll never want to use a computer where it isn’t installed, and TouchCursor can run from a USB drive, making it easy to take it wherever you go. If you want to become more efficient at the keyboard, TouchCursor will be a welcome addition to your system.

Vista adds some neat new behaviors for mouse users, but keyboard users seem to have taken a back seat. Just a few annoyances I noticed after using Vista for a few hours:

#1: Vista adds a new “message box on steroids” called the task dialog. It adds some sorely-needed features, but unfortunately, one handy Windows feature (common to message boxes and dialogs containing only buttons and labels) that it doesn’t implement is the capability to make a selection via a mnemonic letter without using the Alt key. For instance, the UAC dialogs are task dialogs and have choices like Allow or Continue, but you must press Alt+A or Alt+C to select those choices rather than A or C by itself.

#2: Too many tab stops to navigate panes in Windows Explorer (4 in XP vs. 8 in Vista), and the tab order is not intuitive (for instance, the list view precedes the column headers). Dedicated keys to jump directly to each pane are sorely needed.

#3: When launching an application from an Explorer view and a UAC prompt is displayed, when returning to the Explorer view, the keyboard focus is lost and you must tab 6 times to get focus back to the file list view.

#4: More steps to log off. Windows Vista: Windows, Right, Right, Right, L. Windows XP: Windows, L, Enter.