How to Use a Browser Without a Mouse on Windows and Mac

If you are tired of moving your hand from the keyboard to your mouse again and again while browsing, this article is for you. In this article, I will explain how you can use a browser without a mouse on both, Mac and Windows.

Switching back and forth between your keyboard and mouse while browsing the web can be more than just a minor hassle. It may not seem like much, but when you’re doing this hundreds of times a day, it can really slow down your workflow—and put unnecessary strain on your hands and wrists.

Of course, you can cut down on mouse use by learning some essential keyboard shortcuts, like those for opening and closing tabs, switching between them, and scrolling with the arrow keys. But even with these handy shortcuts, there are plenty of everyday tasks—like clicking on links or going back a page in your history—that just don’t have default keyboard shortcuts. And these are often the quick actions you instinctively reach for your mouse to handle.

So, is there a way to skip the mouse entirely? Is it possible to do practically everything, from scrolling to clicking on links, all with just the keyboard?

Also read: How to Change the Appearance of Any Website

Using a Browser Without a Mouse

Thankfully, there’s a solution: Vimium. This browser extension, which I’ve been using for over five years, lets you perform nearly every browsing task without touching your mouse.

With Vimium, you can click links, navigate through your browsing history, open, close, and switch tabs, and even search through bookmarks and open tabs—all from your keyboard.

It is free and completely open source and runs on all platforms Mac, Windows and Linux. Plus, it is available for all browsers, including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Mozilla Firefox and even Safari.

To get started, you can install Vimium for Google Chrome, Edge, or other Chromium-based browsers here and for Mozilla Firefox here. There’s also an equivalent extension for Safari called Vimari but I myself haven’t tried it.

(Just so you know, there’s another extension out there called “Vimium C” that does similar stuff, but it’s a tad more complicated to tweak and its UI isn’t as straightforward. So, I’d recommend sticking with the one I mentioned earlier.)

Vimium goes beyond the basic keyboard shortcuts you’re used to and is designed to let you rely entirely on your keyboard for an efficient, mouse-free browsing experience.

There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Don’t worry though, I will make it easy for you in this article.

Before we go any further, I recommend installing the extension first and then reloading this page. This way, as you read along, you can try out the keyboard shortcuts as you come across them, giving you a quick handle on the most important ones right from the start.

Let’s now learn how you can handle various common browsing tasks using only the keyboard with Vimium.

Also read: 3 Amazing Ways to Put Two Tabs Side by Side on Mac

Scroll without a mouse

When it comes to browsing, the scroll wheel on a mouse is pretty crucial. It lets you move a webpage up, down, and sometimes even left or right. But what if you’re navigating without a mouse?

With Vimium, you can scroll using simple keys on your keyboard:

• h — Scroll left (if the page has horizontal scrolling)

• j — Scroll down

• k — Scroll up

• l — Scroll right

(If you have installed this extension, pressing j and k keys will scroll this page. Reload if it doesn’t work.)

Why Use h, j, k, and l keys for scrolling?

Scrolling is likely something you do all the time while browsing. It’s probably what makes you switch your hand from the keyboard to the mouse to use the scroll wheel.

These keys are right on the “home row” of your keyboard, where your fingers naturally rest when you’re typing. It puts everything you need for smooth scrolling right at your fingertips, so you can glide along without lifting your hands.

⚠️ Quick Note: Case sensitivity is important here. Lowercase letters like h, j, k and l perform different functions than their uppercase counterparts. This distinction means you can access most core browsing functions with single keystrokes right from your home row.

Faster Scrolling Options

While j and k let you scroll, they tend to move the page pretty slowly. If you want to scroll faster or cover more of the page in one go, Vimium has a solution:

• Scroll Half a Page Down — Press d to jump down by half a page.

• Scroll Half a Page Up — Press u to move up by half a page.

Jump to the Top or Bottom of the Page

Want to quickly jump to the top or bottom? Vimium offers handy shortcuts:

• Jump to the Top — Press gg to scroll straight to the top.

• Jump to the Bottom — Press G to skip directly to the end of the page.

How to Click Links Without a Mouse

One of the biggest hinderance of the browser’s built in keyboard shortcuts is its inability to click links. This is where Vimium shines.

Here’s how you can do it:

• Open a Link in the Current Tab: Press f. This will display a label over each clickable link on the page. Just type the corresponding label to click the link.
• Open a Link in a New Tab: Press F instead of f if you want the links to open in new tabs.

This is how these labels look:

If you accidentally hit ⁠f or ⁠F, just press the ⁠Esc key to get out of that mode.

This feature is incredibly helpful for keyboard-driven browsing, especially if you need to open multiple links without losing your place on the current page.

Also read: How to Disable YouTube Shorts on PC Permanently in 2024

How to Go Back in the Browser using Keyboard

You don’t need a mouse to navigate backward or forward in your browsing history with Vimium:

• Go Back in History: Press H to move back to the previous page in your browsing history.
• Go Forward in History: Press L to move forward to the next page.

Remember, lowercase h and l let you scroll left and right. So, in a way, H and L help you ‘scroll’ back (left) and forward (right) through your browsing history. It’s a helpful metaphor to remember the shortcuts.

These shortcuts make it easy to move through your browsing history, saving you from having to reach for the mouse every time you want to go back.

How to Open, and Close tabs Without a Mouse

Vimium also allows you to handle tab management directly from the keyboard. Here’s how:

• Create a New Tab: Press t to open a new tab.
• Close the Current Tab: Press x to close the tab you’re on.
• Reopen the Last Closed Tab: Press X to bring back the most recently closed tab.
• Duplicate the Current Tab: Press yt to duplicate the tab. (Just think of ⁠y like you’re yanking or copying the URL and ⁠t like you’re opening it into a new tab. It’s a nifty way to remember what those keys do!)

With these commands, you can open, close, and navigate tabs entirely from the keyboard.

How to switch between tabs without a mouse

When you browse, you often switch tabs. With traditional keyboard shortcuts, you usually do this using Ctrl + Tab (Cmd + Tab on Mac) but Vimium also provides a few of its own keys to do this, in addition to a few more features:

• Switch to the tab on the left: Use J to move one tab to the left
• Switch to the tab on the right: K to go one tab to the right.
• Go to the First Tab: Press g0 to jump to the first tab.
• Go to the Last Tab: Press g$ to switch to the last tab.
• Go to the previously visited tab: Press the caret (^) key.

The caret key (^) (above the 6 key) comes in really handy when you’re flipping between two tabs.

Also read: How to Open Multiple PDFs at Once

Navigating the bookmarks, history and tabs without a mouse

Vimium also comes with a powerful search tool, called the Vomnibar. It can open bookmarks, history entries, and more—all without a mouse:

• Open URL, Bookmark, or History Entry: Press o (O, not zero) to open the Vomnibar and search for a URL, bookmark, or history entry.
• Open in a New Tab: If you want to open your search item, you’d have to launch the vomnibar using capital O.
• Open a Bookmark: Press b to search for a bookmark and open it in the current tab.
• Open a Bookmark in a New Tab: Press B if you want to open a bookmark in a new tab.

Sometimes, if you have dozens of tabs open and hunting for a particular tab with mouse becomes exhausting. Thankfully, with Vimium, you can search in your open tabs for any text and open it directly.

• Search Through Your Open Tabs: Press T to quickly find a tab you have open and jump to it. (Remember, lowercase t is for opening a new tab.)

From what I’ve tried out, the Vomnibar looks through the title and URL of all your open tabs. The best part? It uses fuzzy search, so even if you can’t remember the exact title or URL, it still does a great job.

It’s like having an all-in-one search bar for everything while you’re surfing the web.

Finding Text on the Page

Although all browsers support the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + F or Cmd + F) for searching text on a webpage, they don’t make it easy to move through search results without using the mouse.

So, instead of relying on the browser’s default keyboard shortcut, try using the keys provided by Vimium:

• Enter Find Mode: Press / to activate Find mode. A small textbox will appear at the bottom right of the page. Start typing the word or phrase you’re searching for—it will automatically highlight the matched text. Once you finish typing, press Enter to lock the search. Now you can easily cycle through the search results.

• Cycle Forward Through Matches: Press n (for next) to jump to the next occurrence of the word.

• Cycle Backward Through Matches: Press N to jump to the previous occurrence.

To exit out of the search mode, press the escape key.

Copy the current URL

With Vimium, you can use the following keys to copy the URL of the current page:

• Copy the Current URL: Press yy to copy the page’s URL to your clipboard.
• Open Clipboard URL: Press p to open the URL from your clipboard in the current tab, or P to open it in a new tab.
  

View these hotkeys

Of course, there are quite a few keys here, and it’s tough to memorize them all at once. So, there’s a bonus key that lets you bring up a menu or table showing all these keys along with their functions.

Press ? (or Shift + /) to pull up this menu, which lists all the key for various tasks.

For your reference, I am also giving a list of all these keys here so you can keep this page open when you are learning them:

All Vimium hotkeys

Navigating the Page

• Scroll down: j, <c-e>
• Scroll up: k, <c-y>
• Scroll to the top of the page: gg
• Scroll to the bottom of the page: G
• Scroll a half page down: d
• Scroll a half page up: u
• Scroll left: h
• Scroll right: l
• Scroll all the way to the left: zH
• Scroll all the way to the right: zL
• Reload the page: r
• Copy the current URL to the clipboard: yy
• Open the clipboard’s URL in the current tab: p
• Open the clipboard’s URL in a new tab: P
• Go up the URL hierarchy: gu
• Go to root of the current URL hierarchy: gU
• Enter insert mode: i
• Enter visual mode: v
• Enter visual line mode: V
• Focus the first text input on the page: gi
• Open a link in the current tab: f
• Open a link in a new tab: F
• Open multiple links in a new tab: <a-f>
• Copy a link URL to the clipboard: yf
• Follow the link labeled previous or <: [[
• Follow the link labeled next or >: ]]
• Select the previous frame on the page: g[
• Select the next frame on the page: g]
• Select the page’s main/top frame: gf
• Create a new mark: m
• Go to a mark: `

Using the Vomnibar

• Open URL, bookmark, or history entry: o
• Open URL, bookmark, or history entry in a new tab: O
• Open a bookmark: b
• Open a bookmark in a new tab: B
• Search through your open tabs: T
• Edit the current URL: ge
• Edit the current URL and open in a new tab: gE

Using Find

• Enter find mode: /
• Cycle forward to the next find match: n
• Cycle backward to the previous find match: N

Navigating History

• Go back in history: H
• Go forward in history: L

Manipulating Tabs

• Create a new tab: t
• Go one tab left: J, gT
• Go one tab right: K, gt
• Go to the previously-visited tab: ^
• Go to the first tab: g0
• Go to the last tab: g$
• Duplicate the current tab: yt
• Pin or unpin the current tab: <a-p>
• Mute or unmute the current tab: <a-m>
• Close the current tab: x
• Restore the closed tab: X
• Move the tab to a new window: W
• Move the tab to the left: <<
• Move the tab to the right: >>

Miscellaneous

• Show help: ?
• View page source: gs

I have also compiled them into a PDF so you can also take their print out and keep it near your laptop. View or download it from here:

Disable Vimium keys on certain websites

Once you’ve installed Vimium, it starts capturing all your keystrokes automatically. This is handy, but there might be times when you’d rather not have Vimium active on certain sites.

You can either disable Vimium completely on specific websites or just restrict it from capturing certain keys. For instance, I like using YouTube’s native shortcuts to adjust playback speed with > and <. Since Vimium captures these keys too, I’ve set it up to ignore just those two on YouTube.

You can also set Vimium to ignore specific keys or all keystrokes on any website. Here’s how:

1. Go to the website where you’d like to limit Vimium’s keystroke capture.

2. Click the Vimium icon in your browser’s toolbar. This will open a popup that looks like this:

In the popup, you can either enter the specific keys you want Vimium to ignore. For multiple keys, just type them out directly—no commas or spaces needed.

To disable Vimium entirely for a website, just leave the textbox blank and click ‘save.’ The example above shows how I’ve set up Vimium for YouTube.

Also read: How to Check the Size and Dimensions of Any Image Online?

Best Vimium Settings

The default settings work well for most cases, but I like to adjust a few things to make Vimium suit my browsing style even better. Here are a few tweaks I recommend.

To access Vimium’s settings, right-click on the Vimium icon in your browser’s toolbar and select ‘options’ or ‘extension options’ from the menu. This will take you to the settings page for Vimium.

The first option is for Excluded URLs and Keys.

Here, you can put in all the websites on which you don’t want Vimium to run. These could include websites where you do lots of typing, such as google docs or some other website where you use a website’s native shortcuts more, like Spotify or YouTube.

Adjust scroll step size and behavior

Next, I click on the ‘advanced settings’ and tweak the scroll step size. It’s originally set to this super tiny scroll, like about 60px, which doesn’t quite work for me. I prefer bumping it up to 120px. I also make sure to tick the smooth scrolling checkbox.

A small yet powerful setting is the one for ‘Characters used for link hints’. Remember I mentioned earlier that you hit the f key to label all clickable links on a page? Well, in this setting, you can change up which characters it uses for those labels. If you hit a character that’s not on this list, it’ll exit you out of the labels.

So, if you spot the letter f in that string, just get rid of it. This way, hitting f once will show the labels, and pressing it again will hide them. Really useful for avoiding accidental clicks.

Philosophy of Vimium

Earlier, I briefly mentioned that Vimium operates in different modes, allowing it to interpret whether you want to type text or navigate using keystrokes. This section will dive a bit deeper into how these modes work and what each one offers.

The Vimium extension takes its inspiration from a classic text editor called Vim, which itself originated from an earlier editor, VI, developed in 1972—long before the mouse was even invented. This keyboard-only approach shaped Vim’s core philosophy: every action, from scrolling and navigating to deleting, copying, and typing, was designed to be done exclusively through the keyboard.

To make this work, Vim’s creators introduced an elegant concept known as modality. Since the editor needs to differentiate between when the user wants to type and when they want to navigate or edit text, Vim operates in distinct modes. Here are its three primary modes:

• Normal mode: for navigating, cutting, copying, pasting, and moving around the text

• Insert mode: for typing new text

• Visual mode: (for selecting and manipulating text blocks)

Although it may seem counterintuitive, especially for coding, most of your time is spent editing rather than typing new text—and browsing is similar in this sense. That’s why Vim defaults to Normal mode, where you can freely navigate and edit.

When you want to add or insert text, you switch to Insert mode by pressing i, type what you need, and then return to Normal mode by pressing the Escape key.

Wrap up

Navigating the browser with just the keyboard might seem like a tall order at first, but with Vimium, it’s completely doable—and actually pretty empowering. You don’t need to memorize every shortcut at once; just start with the basics and add more as you go.

The ? key is there whenever you need a quick reference, so don’t hesitate to use it. Think of it as your built-in cheat sheet. Also, make sure to bookmark this page for future reference or download the PDF I linked above.

There’s a whole world of functionality in Vimium beyond what we’ve covered here, so take some time to explore and find the shortcuts that work best for you. It’s amazing to realize that everything from opening and closing tabs to precise scrolling and link-clicking can be done without touching the mouse.

With Vimium, browsing becomes a streamlined, keyboard-only experience that lets you fly through tasks with ease.

Thanks for reading.