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Comment by NateEag | Hacker News Reader

I prefer ShortCat's model:

Similar to Vimium, but for the whole OS. Apparently Homerow is similar, judging from comments I'm seeing here.

I really wish I knew an equivalent for Linux. I might even leave Gnome behind if a different DE has a good model for this.

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I like shortcat, but it's slow, even on a modern Mac.

Also, I'm not sure the dynamic nature of the hotkeys is a good thing. I could imagine if you use Mouseless for a long period of time, muscle memory might prevail as screen locations map to the same set of keys.

Some apps have crappy accessibility so Homerow doesn't always work in some apps. so I kind of want to try mouseless as well. I might end up rocking both at the same time.

Scoot supports element-based navigation (c/o accessibility APIs), plus grid-based navigation, via two separate modes:

https://github.com/mjrusso/scoot

Unfortunately both modes are necessary, because many apps have all sorts of accessibility issues.

This looks cool! I’ll have to try it

Brilliant, exactly what I need! (I think!)

ShortCat has a beautiful slogan:

"Manipulate macOS masterfully, minus the mouse."

The picture shows it nicely, too.

(But I bet that most Macbook users don't even use a mouse.)

You could try Hints for Linux

https://github.com/AlfredoSequeida/hints

Thank you! This looks like exactly what I've been looking for!

The name is very reasonable, but effectively ungoogleable.

I haven't tried either yet, but vimium-everywhere and hints seem quite similar.

https://github.com/phil294/vimium-everywhere

https://github.com/AlfredoSequeida/hints

I like Vimium. But does it allow you to do arbitrary drag actions, as this thing does?

I used to use (and love) ShortCat, but it got too slow on my ancient MacBook Pro. I switched to Mouseless, and I actually prefer it now.

Yeah, I tried on an Intel MBP years ago when it was first launched. It was super slow, and I disregarded it. I just gave it a try on an M4 Pro; it's not instantaneous like Vimmium, but it is usable. I am sold!

>I really wish I knew an equivalent for Linux

I highly encourage you to vibecode something. Its really easy. You can get a small fast library that can do OCR with coordinates, and the rest is just interfacing with the x server to draw stuff over the top.

Thanks for the suggestion.

As one who's driving Claude daily due to corporate mandates, I can see why people fall in love with genAI coding, but my revulsion has only grown as I've learned to do it, so I won't be spending my free time with LLMs.

Thank you for this! I was looking for something like this for ages! Used very similar in browsers but never imagined to have a system-wide version!

Have you tried Ratpoison? It's got a bunch of features to manipulate the rat with the keyboard.

If ratpoisons features aren't enough, stumpwm might work well, it's like ratpoison with lisp.

Cagebreak is like ratpoison for Wayland. (I haven't tried it.)

I suspect awesomewm might be a good candidate too. I messed around with trying to make it more ratpoisony. The results were pretty good.

I have not.

I've considered keyboard-driven WMs before, but have thus far gotten by using regular WMs with a few custom keybinds for window sizing, movement, and monitor placement.

As long as you have an automated algorithm for the basic layout, it works pretty well.

I still have to contendb with apps that don't offer the shortcuts I want, though, and that's when Shortcat is very handy.