Gestures in Safari
On Mac OS Leopard, I’ve always been impressed by the speed of Safari. It seemed like Firefox (even the new beta) was getting slower by the day. One day I decided to dedicatedly use only Safari, and even set it up as the default browser. Along with the switch began the search to find replacements for the Firefox plugins I absolutely couldn’t do without – Adblock Plus and Firegestures.
Thankfully, the Adblock Plus team released a Safari version and it works brilliantly! My search for mouse gestures support took me to a shareware app called Cocoa Suite. Unfortunately, the configuration UI had me totally confused and I left it at that.
Today I decided to get it working and realized that it was pretty simple to replicate the Firegestures functionality with Cocoa Suite.
After downloading and installing the application, relaunch Safari. Navigate to the menu option displayed below.
Click on “Preferences”. This will bring up the following window. Make sure it looks exactly the same as the one in the screenshot. What this will do is enable the same kind of gestures as is available in Firefox, using the right mouse button.
Finally, configure the gestures that you require. For that, you will need to choose the “Manage Gestures” menu option in the Safari->Cocoa Suite menu item. The gestures I use are visible in the screenshot below. You can add gestures by clicking on the “Add” button and selecting which application option you want a gesture for. Clicking on the drop-down allows you to select from the different options available in the application’s menu.
Once you choose the command, double-click on the gesture column to the right of the drop down. This will bring up a window in which you can perform your gesture.
To start with the gesture, you will need to press the right-mouse button (Note that the cursor changed to the Cocoa Suite icon. If it didn’t, you will need to go back to the mouse configuration mentioned in the previous steps and double-check). Keeping the right mouse button PRESSED, perform the gesture. If you are satisfied with the output, save it.
Voila! now try it out on the Safari window. You should get a dotted line when you perform a gesture, like in the screenshot below -
The best part is that Cocoa Suite is not just limited to Safari, but you can configure gestures in lots of different Mac OS applications. Give it a try!
