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The Dactyl project is largely about digits. Most of us have five of them on each hand. That's a total of ten fingers that we've all spent years training to operate a keyboard of 80 or more keys without any apparent thought. The Dactyl developers can't reconcile this with user interfaces which make such lax use of such a wonderful resource. We like to work efficiently; to access what we need without hunting through menus or cluttering our screen with buttons and bars; and to never have to interrupt our concentration or work flow by reaching for the mouse when we don't need to.
Towards this end, the Dactyl project reworks Gecko applications likeFirefox,Thunderbird, andSongbird so that we can use them more comfortably and efficiently. We take our inspiration from Unix applications that have been satisfying power users for years, from the ample feedback of our community, and sometimes even from other add-ons for the applications that we extend. We owe a lot to the developers and users of Vim, Links, Lynx, mutt, cmus, Emacs, Conkeror, and many, many others for showing us the way.
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Pentadactyl 1.0 has been released. Other than several bug and compatibility fixes, it is mostly the same as Pentadactyl 1.0rc1.
Posted on Sun, 22 Jul 2012 21:48:55 Z
The first Pentadactyl 1.0 release candidate is finally here. If there are no major issues, this release will become Pentadactyl 1.0. Notable changes since the last beta include:
- Improved performance at startup and on opening the first help page through cacheing.
- Additional search improvements including two long requested features: crude regular expression searches are now possible, and new searches begin within the current viewport.
- Major Text Edit mode improvements.
- Completion improvements, including major speed improvements, key bindings to jump to the next page or completion group, and quite a lot of welcome consistenty and behavioral fixes, especially where asynchronous completions are involved.
- New -pentadactyl-remote command line flag.
A complete list of changes can be found in:help NEWS.
Posted on Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:45:20 Z by Kris Maglione Pentadactyl 1.0 βeta 6 Released
Well, in what's becoming a tradition as the Firefox 4.0 release is repeatedly pushed back, we proudly offer you a new beta with many major improvements over the previous beta. This is expected to be the last beta before the 1.0 release. Among the most noticeable changes are:
- Further startup speed improvements,
- New site-local groups for mappings, commands, abbreviations, and so forth. This powerful new feature allows the creation of what some like to call ‘site scripts’ or ‘site modes’ for those sites where builtin mappings just don't cut it.
- New
:addonsand:downloadscommands to open live-updated add-ons and downloads lists (complete with controls) in the multi-line output area. - An almost complete rewrite of key processing code. Along with many long awaited consistency improvements (especially when an autocomplete drop down is showing), it's now possible to map keys in more modes, including Autocomplete, Hint, and Multiline Output.
- New the
<Pass>pseudo-key to create pass-through mappings, along with key chain support'passkeys'option.
A more complete list of changes may be found below the fold.
Posted on Wed, 9 Mar 2011 05:36:14 Z by Kris Maglione Pentadactyl 1.0 βeta 4.3 Released
It's that time again. We would have been pleased to announce the release of Pentadactyl 1.0 βeta 4.3, had we not delayed the release notification while waiting for addons.mozilla.org approval that never came. Well, that said, there are quite a few improvements in βeta 4 over βeta 3, which are more fully detailed below. The most notable is that Pentadactyl can now be installed, enabled, disabled, and upgraded on Firefox 4 without a restart. Also notable are the ability to map keys in more modes, improvements to the :style and:highlight commands, and improvements to the external editor launcher.
Posted on Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:09:15 Z by Kris Maglione
After several months of hard work, we're proud to release the next βeta in preparation for the Pentadactyl 1.0 release, which should be timed to coincide with release of Firefox 4.0. Most of the effort of this βeta has gone towards performance, bug, and consistency improvements, including fixes for some very long standing annoyances. Additionally, we've added some long and often requested features including conditional support in RC files, the ability to remain in hint mode after selecting a hint, the ability to view the source from any page with an external editor, and the ability to pipe the current page to an external program, and integration of the sanitizer with the Firefox Clear Private Data user interface. See below for a more detailed list of changes.
Posted on Sat, 6 Nov 2010 08:27:42 Z by Kris Maglione