Navigate your computer at the speed of thought

Last updated on 01/04/2026

When using a computer, more time is spent navigating to the place you want to be than actually doing things. I’m sure this doesn’t sound like a problem to most people, but once you experience it you can feel a huge difference. I want to appear at wherever I need to be, whenever I think of it.

General principles

1. The keyboard is faster than the mouse.

Using the mouse is intuitive for most people, but it requires:

• Time to physically move your hand between the keyboard and mouse.
• Cognitive effort to track the position of the cursor.

On the other hand, using a keyboard is almost pure muscle memory once you can type without looking at it.

2. You can never visually find something faster than a computer can search for it.

Applications & windows

The first layer of computer navigation is windows. Most tasks require using multiple applications, each with their own window. However, there is only so much space on the screen, we can’t display all applications at once. Therefore, we have to constantly open, close, and switch between them.

Launching applications

The simplest improvement you can make is to stop using your mouse to click an icon on your desktop or application menu.

Use a launcher and let the computer do the searching. On windows, you can simply use the start menu search, or install Microsoft’s official PowerToys Run utility. For Mac, most users already use Spotlight. Linux desktop environments usually come with a built-in launcher, but third-party options like wofi and fuzzel are also available. I use DankMaterialShell which comes with its own launcher I can launch with Mod+Space.

Set keyboard shortcuts for your most commonly used apps, such as those you would pin to your taskbar. For me, these apps are my terminal, browser, and file manager.

Switching active windows

On most desktop environments, floating windows overlap each other and you switch between them by clicking or dragging them. Some use the Alt+Tab shortcut, which is better, but still requires visual searching which is slow. Imagine your screen as a table and your windows are sheets of paper on it. As they pile up, it becomes harder and harder to find the find the right one. To solve this problem, we have to abandon floating windows and adopt a windows manager.

On a windows manager, windows don’t overlap. You arrange them on your screen and organise them into multiple workspaces. Instead of searching through every open window to find the one you need, you remember where you placed it and instantly switch to it. This trades visual searching effort for memory effort, but if you have a consistent usage pattern (e.g.: workspace 1 for browser, workspace 2 for text editor) then it’s easy to work with.

Terminal navigation

Traditionally, cd is used to change the working directory. The problem with this is that you rarely know the exact path of the directory you want to be in. Instead of checking directories one at a time, use fzf to fuzzy find the directory:

• alt+c to search for a directory and switch to it.
• ctrl-t to search for a file or directory and insert its path into current command

Another use for fzf is using ctrl-r to search and insert command from shell history.

I also replaced cd with zoxide, which tracks your recently and/or frequently visited directories and allow you to use partial paths for them:

# for example, instead of
cd .config/nvim/lua

# you can just use
cd lua

Text navigation

The best way to navigate through text is vim motions.