💾 Archived View for heavysquare.com › unix › 9950-no-mouse.txt captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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Thu 02 Jul 2020 08:04:37 PM CEST # keynav - click on the screen driven by keyboard I recently purchased a Planck EZ. That's a programmable keyboard. It can do mouse navigation, though it would require practice to use it effectively. There are three speed setting defined in QMK, so you can go fast or slow. I'm already using qutebrowser, in which I turned off the address bar and tabs as my setup is usually tabless. I just open a new window for everything. Combined with a tiling window manager, it's quite plesant and all the content is on the screen, so you're more likely to close the ones you're not using anymore. Anyway, I'm just mentioning qutebrowser because it has a pretty solid link hinting feature (you press a key, and all clickable items.. well almost all of them get a key sequence which when pressed, activates the link). I used to use surf, but wasn't able to activate the link hinting JavaScript thingy in it, so I switched. QMK also knows two-way communication with the computer, so I had the idea of writing some software which tells the keyboard the position of the pointer so it could send navigation to places relative to the screen itself, like, the middle, go half way between the side of the screen and the current position, etc. It turns out that there's already an X program for that, it's called keynav. I agree that there are tasks best resolved via clicking on the screen with a mouse, like playing FPS games, annotating visual artifacts, but navigating menus/HTML is not one of them. I'm against web interfaces as well. While I can record repeating patterns of work from the command line into a script, for UI, tuned for clicking buttons appearing here and there, that's much more difficult. Can be done, eg with Selenium, but still, some sites don't like being automated because the bad reputation of automation software being used for data scraping activities.