jk

[cos]

You can use "j" and "k" to go to the next or previous item in a lot of web based applications, including Flickr, delicious, Facebook, Google+, Gmail... try it. Try it anywhere else - it's probably supported by some applications you use that you didn't know supported it.

Web services copied this from the Unix world, where it was popularized by the vi text editor, nethack, and a bunch of other programs. If you used a Unixy text mode email program like elm, mutt, or pine, then you had j/k for up/down.

[Poll #1913605]

Comments

[blimix.livejournal.com]

Utterly unfamiliar, and I used elm and pine. I don't know whether I used j/k back then; it was about 19-16 years ago.

[amadea.livejournal.com]

Keep expecting you to end this post with j/k
like, just kidding!

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

ME TOO!

[cos]

I expected that :)

[electron100.livejournal.com]

Being on the Emacs side of the holy war, it's not a keybinding I think about very much (except in rare instances when I'm on a bare-bones system with only vi). I vaguely remember that a 3D modeling program I used a while back used those bindings as well, although I don't remember which one.

[cos]

I mostly used emacs, rarely vi, but j/k was in everything else. nethack, elm, mutt, screen (in scrollback mode), ...

[pir.livejournal.com]

In some things n is also a keyboard shortcut for next, so I got the habit in Reader to use n and k rather than j and k because it's more comfortable for me to rest my hand on the keyboard on those keys since I have pretty bug hands.

[sapience.livejournal.com]

I don't use a qwerty keyboard, so I tend to forget, since it's not as easy to use in dvorak layout.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Most also have the left/right arrow keys enabled for keyboard navigation purposes.

[frolain.livejournal.com]

I only knew it worked on gmail, and hadn't thought to use it elsewhere. Now that I know I will try it more often.

[kirin]

Vague memory probably from nethack.

Out of curiosity I just tried them in ALPINE, a pine successor that I still use all the time as a mail reader via telnet, and they don't work there - 'j' is 'jump to message #' and 'k' is unbound, in both subject list and message display modes.