as days pass by

Foxpose is a Firefox extension* that shows all your tabs, shrunk, inside the window so you can choose between them. It’s obviously a blatant rip-off of OS X’s Expose, but then that’s a good UI and so using it in other places is a good idea. However, having to find the tiny icon in the Firefox status bar and click on it to do the Foxpose thing is a major pain in the arse; it means that using Foxpose is considerably slower than scanning your tab titles. Yes, there’s a hotkey, but that’s still a pain (not least because you have to focus Firefox first and then press the hotkey and then switch back to the mouse to click on a tab and…bah). Optimoz is a Firefox extension that allows you to use “mouse gestures”: hold down a button or a hotkey and draw a shape on your Firefox window and something happens, depending on what the shape was. For example, drawing a short line from right to left does the same as pressing the Back button; drawing a squarish lower-case h (go down, up, right, down) goes to the home page, and so on. It’s most useful. These two can be profitably combined. In Optimoz, set up a “custom” action. You can customise Optimoz by going to Tools > Extensions > Mouse Gestures > Options. From there, click Edit Mappings on the General tab. Add a new mapping with New. In Function type set Custom, in Mapping name write Foxpose, and in Custom JavaScript code write Viamatic.Xpose.Main(); (thanks to Jens Bannmann for help there!). Then click Recognize and draw a mouse gesture in the box that appears (I use a line left-to-right and then right-to-left, so my gesture is coded as RL, but pick whatever you want). OK button all the way out. You can now use your chosen mouse gesture to do the Foxpose thing. Marvellous.