The concept is simple. The extension displays a number next to each link on the active web page which, when pressed, will load the url of the link in the browser. This can mean digits in the hundreds on some websites like Wikipedia who use automatic internal link placements.

The corresponding numbers can be pressed on the numeric pad or standard keyboard. Google Chrome will start loading the website immediately after pressing one of the links. The links are displayed and hidden with the ALT G keyboard shortcut. The extension can be configured to open tabs in a new foreground or background tab (by pressing g or b).

It does however seem to have slight problems with JavaScript links which can be observed on a Google Search page for instance. This is more of a display problem than a usability problem though. Internet Chrome users who want to install Keyboard Navigation need a Chrome 4 developer version to do so. The extension can be downloaded from the Chrome Extensions website.

Navigating through your folders and files in Explorer using keyboard instead of mouse is rather a matter of personal preferences and comfort (as long as we ignore the “I wanna look more pro” part). Simple and widely recognized navigation hotkeys like arrow keys, PgUp/Dn and Backspace aren’t worth mentioning. However, in complex folder structure with many objects in it, this kind of navigation becomes a bit clumsy since it often takes longer to hop to the object of interest than it would take with mouse. The solution to this can’t be easier than it is.

When looking for something specific within the folder structure, you usually do have an idea of what the name of the container or file is and it’s therefore easy to quickly identify such an object, which is moreover in most cases alphabetically sorted. Still, even using the ABCs for easier navigation can become a bit obsolete in stuffed folders. Fortunately, Explorer ain’t as stupid as it might appear and if you simply type the beginning of the object’s name, it immediately tries to find a suitable match and points to it by selecting it. That’s it, just use a small part of the object’s label to quickly get to it as though you were using Launchy or similar app launcher with the difference that Explorer takes care of this by default too.

To provide a simple example and clear out any confusion, imagine we want to quickly navigate to the Windows’ wallpapers folder to tinker with some of them. Say your system partition is labelled Primary, go ahead and type “pri…” within the MyComputer window, then hit Enter as soon as it gets selected. Our final destination (C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper) can be easily reached in a similar way, perhaps by typing something like “wi”, “we”, “wa” while always hitting enter in between, of course. The number of chars required to select the desired object is naturally dependent on the amount of objects in a folder as well as the variety of their labels. But it does work pretty fast in most cases.

This kind of quick navigation should be supported by virtually any file manager under Windows, including Frigate (advanced implementation of this feature), TotalCommander as well as registry editors and other applications listing folder structure or any other elements. Another way of quick navigation through your folder structure is by engaging an application launcher like formerly mentioned Launchy. Though, the disadvantage resulting from this is a much larger database that has to absorb much more data if you set it to index your whole drive and its contents.