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A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

lwn.net

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Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#21

Post by djfergus »

nabogh wrote: post #15
djfergus wrote: post #6

So many good options here. Vimium is the gateway drug to the fantastic qutebrowser (more integration and customisation, scripting, based on qtwebkit/engine).

I just want to say thank you for mentioning qutebrowser. I'd never heard of it before and I'm now hooked.

Qutebrowser is not perfect but the concept and keyboard control is spot on.

Specifically ad blocking is not as comprehensive as eg brave or ublock since they don’t have element hiding - just domain blocking. There was some discussion on GitHub to add it but I’m not sure of current status. This means that you’ll see Reddit and YouTube ads unfortunately (without some scripting effort;)

Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#22

Post by akdor1154 »

After being a Linux user for 10 years, the one thing I still miss from Windows is the ubiquity of tabbing around dialogues - this is still only at about 80% in day to day Linux stuff, which is enough to make it not something I use for a primary method. (in fairness, at least half of this is due to Electron shite.)

Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#23

Post by bradrn »

I was forced to use my computer mouseless for a couple of months recently (due to problems with the USB ports). It wasn’t a huge issue since I had things set up mouselessly to start with: with the combination of Sway, Vimium, Emacs, zathura [0] and warpd [1] it was quite tolerable. That said, I’m happy to have my mouse back now — there’s just too many applications which assume that you have one.

[0] https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/

[1] https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd

Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#24

Post by rendaw »

djfergus wrote: post #6

So many good options here. Vimium is the gateway drug to the fantastic qutebrowser (more integration and customisation, scripting, based on qtwebkit/engine).

I'm really interested in trying qutebrowser, but I've had so many issues with near-constant breakage in python projects. Are there no similar projects in statically typed languages, or maybe compiled?

Also qutebrowser's less powerful adblock, and missing a few other plugins I rely heavily upon...

Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#25

Post by NBJack »

This is one of the things that pisses me off about MacOS. Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component. In a pinch, the keyboard is your friend, at least until your pointing device is back up.

MacOS: lol, sorry, bluetooth settings require a pointing device to add a new one. Keyboard navigation? Sure. It worked up until this part, but we didn't bother to allow the add button to be selectable. Why? Reasons.

Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#27

Post by perdomon »

NBJack wrote: post #25

This is one of the things that pisses me off about MacOS. Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component. In a pinch, the keyboard is your friend, at least until your pointing device is back up. MacOS: lol, sorry, bluetooth settings require a pointing device to add a new one. Keyboard navigation? Sure. It worked up until this part, but we didn't bother…

The worst for me is being able to select the non-default option in an alert window. Sometimes CMD + 'the first letter of the word in the button' works, but that's like a 30% chance. How is there not a standard for that? I'd even accept the arrow keys + Enter at this point.

Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#28

Post by bsnnkv »

If anyone is trying to reach mouseless nirvana on Windows, I maintain a tiling window manager[1] and a hotkey daemon[2] (though you can bring your own thanks to the architecture choices I made), the former of which provides a very robust event subscription system which you can integrate with using any language of your choice.

One of the cooler parts of my little mouseless ecosystem is that I automatically have different keyboard layers (QMK style) activate depending on which application is currently focused, saving me a whole bunch of time fumbling around with obscure hotkey combinations for changing layers![3]

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/whkd

[3]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana

Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#29

Post by subsection1h »

In addition to making changes like those described in the article, I bought a Svalboard keyboard (https://svalboard.com), which has a trackball under the phalanges of each hand. This allows the user to use their pointer with minimal hand movement. Here's a relevant video: https://youtu.be/RCXgPqlpZeM

Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

#30

Post by codetrotter »

NBJack wrote: post #25

This is one of the things that pisses me off about MacOS. Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component. In a pinch, the keyboard is your friend, at least until your pointing device is back up. MacOS: lol, sorry, bluetooth settings require a pointing device to add a new one. Keyboard navigation? Sure. It worked up until this part, but we didn't bother…

I wonder if VoiceControl can be turned on without a mouse, and then one might be able to use VoiceControl to add a pointing device without currently having any pointing device.

I’ve only tried VoiceControl very very briefly and it was a bit difficult to get it to do what I meant that it should do, I seem to remember. But might be worth trying it a bit more.

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