Customise Opera for a Netbook display

While there are plenty of websites and blog posts advising people on customizing Firefox for their spanking new netbooks, there is very little written about Opera. 

Having recently moved to Opera (and found it to be as good, if not better than Firefox) I have been trying to customize it for my Eee 901. 

Obviously, you could simply hide all of the toolbars, but what do you do when you need to use a function from that toolbar? After some reading I have found a few useful hints to hide the menus and yet provide you with access at the click of a button. I have mapped mine to F10 but you can replace this with your own choice. 

To hide the main Menu and Address bar go to Tools > Preferences (or press CTRL+F12) and go to the Advanced tab. On the bottom left you will see the Shortcut options. Here you can edit or add your own shortcuts. Select Opera Standard (or Opera Standard Unix if your on Linux) and click Edit. This should open the Edit Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box. Drop down the 'Application' section, here you can click add  and create a shortcut to hide the Menu bar and the Address bar.   

I have added the following:

f10 - View address bar, 6 & Delay, 10000 & View address bar, 0

f10 ctrl - Enable menu bar | Disable menu bar

The first will display the Address bar then hide it after the specified time, the second will toggle the menu bar on of off. The Menu bar functions can still be accessed without showing the menu bar using ALT- and the appropriate letter as normal, its just that the menu does not actually appear. 

Hopefully, these two adjustments will make viewing content with Opera on a netbook screen more bearable!

Links:

This site has detailed directions for hiding / toggling  the various Opera toolbars:

Link - http://operawatch.com/news/2008/06/auto-hide-toolbars-in-opera.html