The Best Mouse is no Mouse
Your tools should work for you, not the other way around. The mouse is a small example of something that quietly reversed that relationship.
At some point you notice the mouse. Not as a tool, but as an interruption. A small, constant tax on your attention, pulling your hands off the keyboard and your mind off the task. There are plenty of good reasons to try to minimise mouse use: whether you're dealing with a repetitive strain injury, working on a small screen, or simply want to keep your hands on the keyboard and your focus in the flow.
How do I use the mouse less?
aka ‘Welcome to the Cheat Sheets’ (as The Wonderstuff nearly said)
The following tools are my chosen final set for getting the most out of a minimal mouse-free setup.
Editor, Email and Multitasking | Neovim, Neomutt and Tmux
For editing, I’ve been using Vim for years. It’s a work of art. The problem is that getting the most out of it involves remembering keyboard shortcuts galore. So here they are in pdf and svg formats. (dark mode friendly too)
If you have built a cyberdeck and want to make it more usable, then these tools should help you spend more time actually using the beauty. Made your own cheat sheets for common tools? Then fork the repository and add them.
If you want to know what sent us down this particular rabbit hole in the first place, the Boostbox Cyberdeck is where it started.
Congrats, you now have a fine-looking setup with a minimal, trusted set of tools. Once you've built an environment you can vouch for, it's worth asking whether the things you send out into the world can be vouched for too.
Enter GPG
Proving who you are online is getting harder. Code, documents, communications: the provenance of almost anything can be faked or disputed.
GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard, usually called GPG) is the standard open-source implementation of OpenPGP, used to sign and verify files, commits, emails, and releases. It lets you attach a cryptographically verifiable “this came from me” to whatever you publish.
Having used GPG for decades, I’ve received about three signed emails, so it’s woefully underused - but brilliant.
I've linked to a solid setup guide. Worth the hour it takes to set up.
