
Finder: To open Finder, press and hold Command + Tab to see all open apps.Dock: To get to the Dock without a mouse, press Control + F3 (or Fn + Control + F3), then use the arrow keys to navigate.You may need to hold down Fn as you press Control + F2 for this to work.Menu bar: To select something from the menu at the top of the screen, press Control + F2 to activate the menu bar, then use the arrow keys to move through the menus and sub-menus.But first, if you can't use your mouse to select an item, you can make the selection with your keyboard. You can easily left click using your Mac's keyboard without any special setup. Set up a Raspberry Pi, GUI mode, without a mouseĪs of August 2021, I have been using Vimium for seven years and keynav for six months.Select the item you want to click.Put the keyboard on your lap and never move your arms.

Press the key for the link to navigate or q to cancel. Press q to cancel.į opens the Vimium overlay. This blog post contains toy implementations of Vimium and keynav.
#Mouseless computer windows#
While the project is Linux-only, I wrote a tiny version of keynav for Windows using AutoHotKey as suggested by the keynav docs. In practice, this is done by starting the keynav process, pressing Ctrl- to pop up an overlay and then repeatedly pressing either hjkl for dividing up the screen, w for moving the cursor to the center of the selection area and 1, 2 or 3 for left, middle or right clicking.īesides being potentially much faster than numpad navigation, Vimium on a Raspberry Pi can take a few seconds to set up all shortcuts depending on how busy a web page is. Once you’re done moving, you simply indicate (with a key stroke) that you want to move. A move is a direction: up, down, left, and right. The screen is initially wholely selected. keynav applies the binary space partitioning idea to mouse navigation.

While the numpad approach works well, it can be a bit slow. On Windows, as things are always changing in the Control Panel World, refer to the Windows documentation. For more details, check out the LinuxReviews wiki. To set this up on a Linux with Xorg, run setxkbmap -option keypad:pointerkeys in a terminal then press Shift + Num Lock to make your numeric keypad control the cursor. The 4862 keys are for moving left, up, right and down respectively. While controlling a virtual keyboard with a mouse is hardly joyful, controlling the cursor with your keyboard makes you look pretty cool.

Not all applications support a good keyboard-only experience. Similar ideas in the programming tools space are easymotion and avy. Type that shortcut, navigate to that page.īesides being faster than tab-based navigation, it can be useful during pair-programming sessions: press f and your coworker can simply say out loud the letter sequence of the link he wants you to navigate to. With the Vimium extension installed, pressing f will make every visible link on the page get a one-to-three letter shortcut. Good for discovering keyboard shortcuts, too. You can then navigate using the arrow keys and pressing the underlined letters in the menu bar items.

This can also come in handy for image links and forms: search for a term close to the image or element you want to click or focus on then tab-navigate to it.įor GUI applications in general, on Windows and Linux pressing Alt on will open and/or focus on the applications menu bars. To follow text links, press Ctrl+F, type part of the link text until it matches, press Esc and your link will be focused.
#Mouseless computer pdf#
Page Up, Page Down, Home and End can be used to scroll through web pages and PDF documents. You can go pretty far without a mouse using a combination of Tab, Shift+Tab and arrow keys.įor web browsers, accessible websites such as Google and Wikipedia have focus states for interactive elements and some even contain Jump to navigation, Jump to main content tab-accessible links as the very first things you can tab-navigate to. Here are the things I learned and rediscovered. Instead of getting it fixed, I took it as challenge to stop using the mouse entirely. A few months ago the trackpad in my work computer stopped working properly.
