EasyGestures Makes Browsing As Easy As Pie

Posted on October 15, 2003

Easygestures is a thorough overhaul of the old RadialContext extension for Mozilla Firebird, allowing you to navigate menu options using easy-to-use “pie menus“. They sound complicated, but their big advantage is that they take advantage of something called muscle memory: in a pie menu, gesturing in a certain direction with the mouse will always produce the same effect, so eventually you can swiftly do things like open new tabs, save items to your desktop, and add a page to your bookmarks without even having to read the menus at all. Once you get used to that, old-fashioned menus are hard to go back to!

RadialContext was good, but EasyGestures makes a good thing even better by providing much better tool tips to help you learn which gestures do what, and allowing you to completely remap commands to gestures, so that you can tune the menus to do whatever you like. If you’re using Firebird, give it a try, and don’t give up on it right away — take a little time to get used to pie menus, and how completely they can speed up the experience of browsing. You’ll be glad you did.