A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop | Hacker News Reader

A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop

lwn.net

158 pointssigna11110 comments

It'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.

One 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.

Do you also flog yourself when you make mistakes? Or is that just something you think others should do?

I find I can do plenty in the browser via Vimium extension, tabbing and general keyboard shortcuts (PgUp/Dn, Ctrl+t/n/f/e/r/q)

Set 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.

That "pay" will always disappears, but the keyboard placement and vim commands never disappear.

I 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.

Why would it disappear? I have used the same key bindings (from Sublime) on Jetbrains IDEs for years.

wait, so, do you really move your mouse cursor all the way up to the little tiny x every time you'd like to close a tab in your browser?

Closing tab is at least 10x more rare event for me than choosing another tab, and for me doing this with cursor is handy since all the webpages suppose I have a mouse and none of them suppose I know how to surf without mouse. Choosing another tab for me is never like Ctrl[-Shift]-Tab because I have too much of them.

Windows 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!

Mice were also more rare in the era in which early Windows was common. So keyboard support was often a necessity.

Yeah. 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

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.

Did you enable this setting? If yes, can you tell me more what's missing?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mchlc06d1059/...

Doesn't this require foresight that your mouse may fail? It isn't enabled by default.

Any other OS, you'll be able to at least tab around without the mouse.

It wasn't on the page linked above but on this page [1] at the bottom it reads:

> To quickly turn Full Keyboard Access, Sticky Keys, Slow Keys, or the Accessibility Keyboard on or off using the Accessibility Shortcuts panel, press Option-Command-F5 (or if your Mac or Magic Keyboard has Touch ID, quickly press Touch ID three times).

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlae61a6de/...

What's missing is discoverability -- something Apple used to claim to care about.

To your credit, this does indeed work, but I won't retract my point. It's super-kludgy to go through everything like this, and I definitely can't leave it on all the time. I'm spoiled by the innate tab, shift-tab options of other operating systems. Ironically, when I tried to turn on the accessibility feature just through keyboard nav of Settings, I failed to get to the checkbox (there is at least a global Accessibility shortcut...if it's switched on).

I'm at a loss to explain why this particular navigation issue shows up in the Settings app. Other, less critical parts of the OS actually work fine.

Hilariously, I was once trying to install MacOS to a HP university laptop, hackintosh style, and got into a situation where after hours of kernel panics and boot configurations I finally got far enough to see the MacOS install screen on the display!

I did not have working trackpad or usb, but undeterred I continued with keyboard navigation through the install menu, going further and further, partitioning and formatting drives and whatnot, until finally I hit the language selection dropdown, one of the last steps in the install process. This screen, although simple, did not have keyboard accessibility. I tried everything I could but never got the mouse to work, and was stuck at the language select. Frustratingly the screen also played some weird pop music full blast which I never was able to lower the volume of.

I still think somehow they knew, that they were mocking me, knowing that the trackpad would always work on a real mac, and only kids with too much free time would be stuck on the final step of the install process...

Interesting. Did this change in the last decade? I remember MacOS as being very keyboard-friendly out-of-the-box and awesome for automating GUI. But then again, the last MacOS I used was 10.6, around 15 years ago. And I heard automating GUI suffered in recent versions. So they lost on the keyboard-abilities too, I guess.

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.

> How is there not a standard for that?

There was, long ago, in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.

Which apple always sets an example for by not following.

System Settings / Accessibility / Keyboard / Full Keyboard Access

This is macOS we're talking about. You can move the pointer with your face if you want (or more likely, if you need to).

Often space cycles this, for some reason.

This is a nice tip! This does not work for MacOS alerts that want you to enter data (like a file name to save), but I will be using this and the other guy's CMD + . (period) tip as much as possible in every other scenario.

If the non-default option is a cancellation or negative action, cmd-period should usually work.

This 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.

Delete button in dialog: cmd-delete.

(Edit: Just tested this in numbers, works fine. In cases where the button isn't correctly tagged as a "delete" button it might not -- in that case, cmd-<first letter of button content> will almost always work.)

Okay, one more question. When I have multiple terminal tabs open with processes running, I get an alert window with three options: Review Windows, Terminate Processes, Cancel:

https://imgur.com/a/mNQNRaI

I can cancel with CMD + (period), but I can't seem to select Terminate Processes with anything except the mouse, since it isn't the default option and it isn't cancel.

Any idea if this one is possible without turning on the keyboard navigation accessibility option?

It /should/ be cmd-t, but just confirmed that that doesn't work. I'd consider this a bug, and would suggest filing a radar for it.

I’ve never done that before but will! How fun!

Absolute legend

Had to use a Mac at a job last year. It wasn't used much so the mouse wasn't charged. Why oh why is the mouse unusable when it's charging!?

My Bose headphones also aren't usable while charging. Very frustrating. I don't care if there are technical reasons. It's just bad UX.

Same with my Sony headphones. Never understood the reasoning.

Allegedly, for the Mac mouse the reason is so that people can't use it permanently plugged in, because cables are ugly and against "the Apple philosophy".

My cordless beard trimmer doesn’t run when plugged in, so you have to wait for it to charge before using it. When getting ready in the morning, you can’t sit around for an hour waiting for it to charge enough to function.

It makes no sense.

I mean from an EE perspective it makes some sense, because you save some on circuitry (not like a lot in absolute cost, but your cordless beard trimmer probably doesn't have a lot of margin).

So the real reason is probably just to make it cheaper. (Well maybe not in the Mac case)

Cordless trimmers are generally waterproof because some people use those under the shower.

Having them non operational when charging can very well be a safety measure so that they don't use it while plugged in.

There's really no excuse for headsets like Bose where such circuitry is a rounding error in the hefty price tag.

Hell, they even have USB circuitry that enumerates as an actual device on the bus but couldn't be arsed to have it be a proper audio class device.

Yeah in case of the beard trimmer it's because it uses quite a lot of power so you need a beefy adapter to run it. These often still use NiMH cells and trickle charge with 100mA or so.

For a mouse this is all irrelevant because it uses so little power that it can easily be powered by a regular USB.

Also, many bathrooms don't have sockets anyway. At least not nearby (and cooper is expensive too these days)

Supposedly it's by design. The justification being something along the lines of "you're doing it wrong" if you have to drag the cable around while mousing.

I had a first generation Mac mini, and I was playing around with mouse settings and accidentally changes some setting that basically disabled my mouse. The problem was the button or control to change it back didn't work via keyboard. I eventually recovered but came very close to wiping the machine.

I just tried, and if you hit 'Tab' a couple of times, it will select the 'Connect' button that shows up after the name of the discovered devices.

From time to time I need this to re-pair with my, very old, logitech wireless mouse, that's why I knew it is totally possible with just the keyboard.

This issue was with 'Add'. My Mini is still hampered by this flaw.

It's not ALL bad, when I recently replaced my 2012 MacBook Pro with a 2024 Air M3, I was pleased to see that Apple FINALLY allows tabbing in system pop menus for things like Save, Delete, Close and selecting those options with the Space bar. Not sure when that was added as default behaviour, but I always found this frustrating coming from Windows. The interesting thing is that precisely one app I used on the 2012 MBP - Ableton Live Digital Audio Workstation - always allowed keying through popups flawlessly - so the underlying capability was there.

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.

macOS also really had great keyboards shortcuts. Maybe even more than Windows. But Apple also plastered them over :(

>Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component.

Windows abandoned that from Windows 10 onwards, and Windows 11 is even worse.

I'm a fan of ratpoison - https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

There's dozens of us!

It's a rather nice wm, or at least it was some twenty years ago when I used it between something I've forgotten and IceWM.

Should probably check it out again and compare to how I've been using i3 since 2018 or so.

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

I'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!

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

Vimium is absolutely life-changing and I can't believe I've been forced to browse the internet like a caveman for my entire life.

Loved 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.

100% agree. If you are a fan of vim movements and have the muscle memory it’s the only way to navigate.

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

I 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.

You may be thinking of [Homerow](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.

Oh 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

You 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

Thanks for sharing will try this out.

Vimperator 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.

> 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.

Tridactyl works around this by setting a global keybind ( Ctrl - , ) that either pulls focus back to itself or, if it's not allowed on that page, kicks you to a tab it can control

Oh I saw it's name I think but I have never tried it.

I 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.

Where is the juggle? You use the most comfortable input method for a specific task

There 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.

There'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.

I 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.

I’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

I'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.

For mac https://contexts.co/ is awesome for navigating without a mouse

Vimium browser extension FTW, works on Chrome as well.

Interesting 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?

It’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.

True but this is why most tiling interfaces have paging. Scrolling is an interesting alternative though.

It 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.

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...

FWIW 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.

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;)

If 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

(Though I personally drive niri with a lot of touchpad gestures. Three-finger swipes up/down/left/right etc are great.)

My AwesomeWM desktop has nice bindings (move, resize, place) + manual float controls. I rarely touch the mouse

Surprised 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?

I suppose they just didn't want to abandon GNOME.

I 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.

I would say true purism only comes from loading individual bits into memory with toggle switches...

Then let me pee up my COSMAC Elf - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_ELF

Recently, 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/

PaperVM is really neat. Much simpler to setup, learn and understand than for example i3.

I 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.

Of 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.

My 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.

I'm too bad at remembering shortcuts, so the mouse emulating feature using the arrow keys saved my wrists when I had a problem.

I 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.

Use 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!

Have you tried Vimium or something similar?

I have not. Worth a try?

I 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.

Let's see how you can do it with a mouse-driven desktop:)

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.)

On Mac so don’t know when I’ll try this but suggest uhk keyboard for anyone going mouseless

Highly 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

I figured this whole thread would have been about hyprland and nvim, then the sharing of various dotfiles.

Am disappointed.

With 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.

I'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.

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