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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.