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A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
- gal_anonym 2y agoPaperVM is really neat. Much simpler to setup, learn and understand than for example i3.
- liendolucas 2y agoI have been using i3 for years now. Rock solid, extremely lightweight and very simple to use. Once configured I never found myself looking back at it. Documentation is superb, and didn't take me more than a week to get used to it. Never tried PaperWM, nor other WM as nothing has been simpler nor more effective than i3. Probably dwm but I think is for those that like to have some hands on and tweaking.
- dfc 2y agoOf course nothing will ever be simpler than i3 if you never try anything else. I am happy with sway and have resisted the urge to try hyprland/paperwm. But I'm not going to delude myself and say it's because sway is better. It's just that I don't want to endure the switching costs.
- liendolucas 2y agoMy comment was a little bit short. I have used plenty of window manages in the past: window maker, blackbox (now dead I guess?), gnome (from the era of RedHat 6.2 onwards), KDE, Ubuntu desktops (I don't know if is Gnome tweaked or something else). Perhaps I stay loyal to i3 because it was the first tiling manager that I tried and seemed pretty straightforward to be productive with it. Have to try other ones as well but never find time to do so. Same story happened to me with Vim. I still need to give Emacs a shot.
- jvanderbot 2y agoThere's so many ways to do this with tiling window managers, keyboard managers for browsers, scriptable keyboards, etc. My personal setup is Guake for instant terminal, chat gpt cli, Firefox + vimium, and a tiling gnome extension (wintile I believe). It's minimally invasive, and bog standard Ubuntu otherwise.
- tom_ 2y agoI switched to mousing left-handed at some point, years ago. I noticed some of my left-handed colleagues mousing wrong-handed, possibly because of right-handed siblings, and getting some good use out of having pen and paper more easily accessible because of it. I decided I'd do the same. Something I didn't expect: with my left hand on the home row, I can touch the mouse by stretching my little finger. So it's no effort at all to put my hand on it and use it to move the cursor. And so I've pretty much given up entirely on using the keyboard for arbitrary caret motion. It's much easier to just put my hand on the mouse and move the cursor and click where I want it to go.
- Havoc 2y agoI’ve got a trackball on left that can scroll with rotating the ball. Still very much secondary to mouse but I find myself reaching for it on other computers subconsciously and being surprised when there is just empty desk
- mangomountain 2y agoOn Mac so don’t know when I’ll try this but suggest uhk keyboard for anyone going mouseless
- d4rkp4ttern 2y agoHighly recommend UHK for an initial ergo split setup with a traditional row staggered layout. I put an apple trackpad in between the splits. But now considering getting into column staggered layout splits with integrated trackball/pad like the Sofle https://xcmkb.com/products/sofleplus2 https://xcmkb.com/products/sofleplus2
- djfergus 2y agoSo many good options here. Vimium is the gateway drug to the fantastic qutebrowser (more integration and customisation, scripting, based on qtwebkit/engine).
- nabogh 2y agoI just want to say thank you for mentioning qutebrowser. I'd never heard of it before and I'm now hooked.
- djfergus 2y agoQutebrowser 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;)
- rendaw 2y agoI'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...
- djfergus 2y agoFWIW I use qutebrowser on macOS (homebrew), alpine(postmarketos), Arch and Ubuntu and have never had an issue - installs cleanly via os package manager and just works (including wayland and x11). It’s under active development and the main devs seem pretty responsive to issues. It uses qtwebengine(chromium) - so none of the browser heavy lifting is in python. Don’t write it off due to the language used.
- smoyer 2y agoI'm a fan of ratpoison - https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/
- geniium 2y agoI love these papers. I have been on a similar path on macOS. Concerning Vimium, there is the Vimium C version that seems to be a bit faster. On macOS there is a similar software (don’t remember its name) to use a Vimium like feature on your whole desktop.
- mtoohig 2y agoYou may be thinking of [Homerow](https://www.homerow.app/ https://www.homerow.app/) for Macos. Its okay for popups that I used to need a mouse for. There's another app that does similar "Vimium for Desktop" but it wasn't as responsive and sometimes focus would get stuck, but I forgot that software's name.
- gigatexal 2y agoThanks for sharing will try this out.
- geniium 2y agoOh nice, thanks for sharing this. I don't think it was homerow (or it has evolved a lot). I'll give this one a go to see if this helps me touch less my mouse
- dangson 2y agoYou might be thinking of Shortcat. I've been using it for a while and it mostly works but doesn't seem as polished as Homerow. Going to give that one a try now. https://shortcat.app https://shortcat.app
- nextos 2y agoVimperator was even better, and allowed a very smooth operation of most Firefox without using the mouse. Sadly, it was killed by the transition to a new plugin API. Vimium and other current options lead to quite some friction, as Firefox disables plugins on many scenarios, such as a new empty page. Hence, you often find yourself in a situation where you have to think whether Vimium is active and you can use Vim-like shortcuts, or you need to fallback to the Firefox UI.
- TacticalCoder 2y agoI'm using the Awesome (tiling) WM (written and configurable using Lua) and lots of shortcuts. A toolbar-less / menubar-less Emacs. Terminals etc. But for web browsing I still reach for the mouse.
- johnea 2y agoI would say true purism only comes from loading individual bits into memory with toggle switches...
- smoyer 2y agoThen let me pee up my COSMAC Elf - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_ELF https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_ELF
- nytesky 2y agoI definitely remember using Windows 3.1 near mouseless -- when did Microsoft remove the underscore under menu items? It probably wasn't optimal like some of the modern incarnations, but it was ubiquitous and pretty fast. In this regard I agree with apple about no touchscreens. Switching tasks/input devices have a cost -- you aren't getting rid of the mouse because touchscreens lack precision, so you now have 3 things to juggle for input.
- eviks 2y agoWhere is the juggle? You use the most comfortable input method for a specific task
- ge96 2y agoI was thinking about this as I needed to get another mouse, my Mx Master 2's scroll wheel is nasty/didn't want to bring it into the office... But I ended up just getting a 3 and bringing that in $100 damn... I'm trying to avoid having multiples of something eg. a laptop barely use.
- mcswell 2y agoThere are cursor movement tools that use the keyboard--most obviously, the arrow keys. And at least in Windows, entire windows can be moved around or re-sized with the cursor. But it's also the case that there are keyboard remapping tools that allow you to re-map control keys (or other keys) to be cursor control keys as well; I've used a program like this written in C since the early days of Windows 3.1. (I had to make changes to it over time, but I'm using it as I type this in Windows 11.) I'm pretty sure there are similar keyboard remapping tools in Linux, and probably on Macs. Also: there are re-mapping tools, and there are re-mapping tools. The simple ones allow a one-to-one mapping, e.g. Ctrl-M becomes PageDown. The simplest ones do not allow you to map e.g. Ctrl-D to seven Down arrows, nor do they allow moded mapping--e.g. having Ctrl-Q toggle between selecting and non-selecting cursor movement.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoI'm too bad at remembering shortcuts, so the mouse emulating feature using the arrow keys saved my wrists when I had a problem.
- akdor1154 2y agoAfter 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.)
- bradrn 2y agoI 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/ https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/ [1] https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd
- NBJack 2y agoThis 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.
- perdomon 2y agoThe 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.
- addaon 2y agoIf the non-default option is a cancellation or negative action, cmd-period should usually work.
- perdomon 2y agoThis is a great tip that I didn't know about. Thank you. It doesn't work for Numbers, since I need to DELETE not Cancel the file changes, but I'm sure it'll work in a ton of other places.
- perdomon 2y agoVimium is absolutely life-changing and I can't believe I've been forced to browse the internet like a caveman for my entire life.
- gigatexal 2y ago100% agree. If you are a fan of vim movements and have the muscle memory it’s the only way to navigate.
- cassepipe 2y agoLoved vimium but in the end I went for tridactyl because it combines both vimium and firenvim while being more straightforward (just open a vim window to edit the text box) Also to be able to have a config file in the home to commit to my dotfiles repo is great.
- bsnnkv 2y agoIf 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 https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi [2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/whkd https://github.com/LGUG2Z/whkd [3]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana
- cropcirclbureau 2y agoI've used Komorebi in the past, it seems to be the better tiling option available in windows when I went looking. Thank you for your work!
- subsection1h 2y agoIn addition to making changes like those described in the article, I bought a Svalboard keyboard (https://svalboard.com 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 https://youtu.be/RCXgPqlpZeM
- PeeMcGee 2y agoIt's really humbling and everyone should do it every now and then. An old coworker coined "mouseless monday mornings" where we'd unplug our mice(?) until lunch to start each week. We all learned a lot about how to be more efficient in our IDE's, learned tons of useful OS and browser shortcuts, observed tons of accessibility flaws in our product, and all of that during the dullest hours of the week.
- eimrine 2y agoOne is so stupid, to learn some "useful shorcuts" which are existing only until some megacorp is going to change anything in their software (OS, IDE, browser has almost none of them). I am a huge proponent of learning touchtyping, then vim and... nothing more.
- dizhn 2y agoSet up your own shortcuts for the software that matters to you. Terminal emulator and text editor/IDE will pay for the effort spent very quickly.
- eimrine 2y agoThat "pay" will always disappears, but the keyboard placement and vim commands never disappear.
- abenga 2y agoWhy would it disappear? I have used the same key bindings (from Sublime) on Jetbrains IDEs for years.
- dizhn 2y agoI think we're having a disconnect here. You can keep your custom settings and take them with you wherever you go. This actually also applies to your operating system (especially Linux) but I personally do not mess with them much unless it's a tiling window manager - which is another class of software that benefits greatly from setting up custom shortcuts.
- tetris11 2y agoMy AwesomeWM desktop has nice bindings (move, resize, place) + manual float controls. I rarely touch the mouse
- zikduruqe 2y agoI figured this whole thread would have been about hyprland and nvim, then the sharing of various dotfiles. Am disappointed.
- liendolucas 2y agoSurprised to see PaperWM instead something like i3 or dwm as those are at least for me the top tiling window managers. I haven't tried ratpoison but read that is a good choice as well. Perhaps PaperWM was chosen because of it fancier look compared to more minimalistic UI than i3 or dwm?
- klez 2y agoI suppose they just didn't want to abandon GNOME.
- pkkm 2y agoInteresting choice of window manager. Has anyone here used PaperWM and can comment on how its "scrollable" interface compares to more traditional tiling WMs like i3?
- christophilus 2y agoIt’s awesome. I’ve switched to Niri which was inspired by Paper. When I use Gnome, I always install Paper. I never liked tiling WMs because I generally have a full height text editor, a full size web browser, and a handful of background terminals. This is cramped in a tiling arrangement, but works beautifully in a scrolling WM.
- wkat4242 2y agoTrue but this is why most tiling interfaces have paging. Scrolling is an interesting alternative though.
- Satanister 2y agoLet's see how you can do it with a mouse-driven desktop:)
- INTPenis 2y agoWith Sway and Vimium I'm pretty close, haven't tried Vimium yet I'm just saying that Firefox is probably where I most use the mouse.
- IgorPartola 2y agoI recently rediscovered Ratpoison WM and the origin of its name (tl;dr it is meant to prevent the need for using a mouse). I think the main issue for me really is that navigating the web is sometimes faster with a pointer. I already use vim and the shell for everything else, but navigating Google Maps or Wikipedia or Stack Overflow is just easier when you can point and scroll.
- cess11 2y agoHave you tried Vimium or something similar?
- IgorPartola 2y agoI have not. Worth a try?
- cess11 2y agoI think it's a nice first step in running web browsers from the keyboard. Well, beyond built-in functionality. You push 'f' to get link hints, if there's few they'll be things like 'a', 'c', 'j', 'l', if many it'll build up algorithmically, most I've seen is triples, like 'ade'. You push those keys and it opens the linked page. 'H' to go backwards, 'd' and 'u' to scroll down and up, 'yf' and then a link hint to copy a link URL, 'x' to close a page and 'X' to open the last closed, and so on. Some people want more, like vim motions in input fields and so on, so they opt for more complex tools.
- floren 2y agoUse the right tool for the job and don't feel bad about it. A pointing device is an excellent way to point at things. Btw I've been using stumpwm for years, it's ratpoison but implemented in Common Lisp. Give it a look!
- armiyolo 2y agoFor mac https://contexts.co/ https://contexts.co/ is awesome for navigating without a mouse Vimium browser extension FTW, works on Chrome as well.
- rkagerer 2y agoWindows used to be awesome at this. The norm (and expectation) was for programs to provide keyboard shortcuts for all sorts of things. They were gently surfaced right where you needed them - e.g. underlines on the menus, and accelerator key shortcuts listed beside menu items and in mouseover captions. That made them natural to learn and easy to adopt. Then some dolt at Microsoft decided those cues were "clutter", and hid them by default. A new generation of programmers grew up not knowing about, or not prioritizing, the keyboard. I remember a junior salesguy once watched me use my computer for a few minutes and was blown away by the speed at which I did things. Hope what's old becomes new again!
- paulryanrogers 2y agoMice were also more rare in the era in which early Windows was common. So keyboard support was often a necessity.
- Havoc 2y agoYeah. The window snapping also seems to have been broken. Seems pretty unpredictable as to what the outcome is now. Eg windows key right/left sometimes snaps it to half half. But sometimes to 1/4. 3/4. and sometimes to another screen. No idea why, but seems like botched UX when outcome of keyboard shortcuts feel random to the user
- yencabulator 2y agoIf you're keen on the ideas of PaperWM, but don't want to lug GNOME around for the ride, niri is great: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri (Though I personally drive niri with a lot of touchpad gestures. Three-finger swipes up/down/left/right etc are great.)
- marginalia_nu 2y agoI've been forced by some shoulder issues to reevaluate how I use the computer. My issues seem to mostly be from external rotation of the arm (i.e go from keyboard to mouse movement), though I've had some wrist issues before as well. That's gotten better, but it's still not great. Not sure what I'll try. Split ergo keyboard maybe, and try to get my development workflow to work as mouselessly as possible. I only wish nvim worked better with Java. It's still a bit too flakey. Painfully almost works. Maybe there are some Idea plugins or somethng.
- wkat4242 2y agoIt speaks a lot about tiling. One thing I hate about the current "tiling" options in mainstream desktops, like windows, Mac and even KDE, is that they're so half baked. You can tile windows side by side but then if I make one window a bit narrower to make an uneven split, I still have to manually resize the other one :( That's not tiling.
- jiehong 2y agoRecently, there was a post on HN about mouseless for Mac [0], and I think this can help in situations where no keyboard shortcut is possible. [0]: https://mouseless.click/ https://mouseless.click/