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.
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 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.
Wow, as cool as this is, it's kind of a shame that we need to say "use coords to show where the mouse should click" instead of designing interfaces that keep pointing-device-free users in mind.
With Windows in particular, you absolutely can navigate Windows + Office keyboard only. I do it every day.
Now, third party software, is always going to be all over the place. Stuff that was largely built on Win32 components works fine, but "modern" stylized applications rarely have strong support.
You’re right that lots of Windows apps were designed with Keyboard only workflows in mind. It’s a shame that MacOS has so many points where if you don’t have a mouse you’re out of luck.
There is one major improvement you can do on Mac, at least for menus:
I really feel like this used to be the default. That's how I always did it in macOS going back to the early 2000's.
Only in the last two versions or so did I notice it was no longer the default. I'm glad to see here that I can now re-enable it.
Edit: I see that I do have it enabled. But for some reason there are a lot of programs where it doesn't seem to work anymore, no matter what the settings. Off the top of my head: Half the Adobe programs I use for work.
I get that this might annoy you, but there is a direct trace all the way back to the original Mac in 1984 that required a mouse. As time went on and the two other OSes we still have gained mouse support (Windows, Linux) from their keyboard roots, they brought forward their ethos of keyboard navigation. Mac OS resolutely stayed attached to its mouse only roots.
That seems incredibly subjective. For people with carpal tunnel like myself, having to do everything on the keyboard can be very painful. The mouse alleviates that and gives visual feedback.
If you're interested in keyboard navigation of websites, consider a browser or extension with link hinting support! It worked really well in my experience a few years ago, although I've since became much more of a mouse guy and stopped using it.
Qutebrowser was my favorite browser for keyboard navigation but firefox, chrome, etc. have extensions for this as well.
I remember using TweakUI to enable "always show underline for shortcut key" because that genuinely felt like it should be a default for better usability.
I wouldn't say they're dead, just more hidden (e.g. GTK4 only shows them when you hold Alt). AFAIK most toolkits still support them, but app developers also have to actually define them.
> you absolutely can navigate Windows + Office keyboard only
Unfortunately in Excel many operations can be done only with the function keys (e.g. F2, Shift-F8). I'd argue that leaving the center of the keyboard to press the function keys is not easier or quicker than reaching for the mouse.
On macOS with "Full Keyboard Control" you can navigate the system and most any official app from the keyboard. It's not an efficient experience though.
But that's the point for me. Unlike e.g. Vimium, this thing is not limited to clicking clicky things, but allows to imitate nearly arbitrary mouse movements, very quickly. There are cases when it's important.
> designing interfaces that keep pointing-device-free users in mind.
Agreed. Using keyboard keys to emulate a mouse cursor seems like it ought to be a last resort for graphical applications that lack proper accessibility affordances.
Contrast that with command palettes, accessibility controls, syntax tree navigation, and other approaches that rely on the names, content, and document structure that users already know rather than a special mode that displays two letter codes that must be read each time or memorized. Many of these other approaches also allow users to activate buttons, menu items, and links that are outside the current viewport or hidden in menus which reduces the overall number of "clicks" required to perform those actions. The downside is that they can take longer to type than a two-letter code. Still, my guess is that for most people it would be overall more efficient to optimize for cognitive load than pure speed.
(Though in the long run, I suspect that improvements in eye-tracking will lead to hybrid systems that are both lower cognitive load and faster than any of these.)
I just hit tab 1 to N times and hope for the best. I wonder if VIM style search on elements with a new HTML tag attribute would work (at least for browsers).
It would be great if they built Vim style shortcuts into the spec and browser like you suggested but in the time being we have the Vimium extensions for other browsers. Personally I am not a fan of extensions unless I write them myself.
I'm curious if there's a program that uses a simple detection model for UX components to locate clickable areas. This would allow for global navigation similar to VimiumC
I think it's ok that hardware and software are designed with the 99% in mind. After that you probably run into competing interests/trade-offs anyway (a system built for ergonomics probably looks different from a system built for speed).
I think it's ok that hardware and software are designed with the 99% in mind.
That's called mob rule. We don't act like cavemen anymore. We build entire civilizations to prevent that sort of thing. You may have read in a history book once "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
I think the controller interfaces for FFXIV is worth a study in this. They designed an interface that is workable for an MMORPG with both mouse and controller (in this case, the controller can act as a proxy for our keyboard).
Monthly subscriptions for software like this confuse me. The website also obscures that it's paid at all - the first option is "download for X", then the next option is a red button to "unlock". No pricing link/page, nothing. Aimed at getting you to download and use it, then fork up later.
References mentioned all going on about productivity etc. Red flags all-round.
For Vim it isn’t replacing mouse necessarily. It’s giving you another way to navigate the cursor around the buffer by giving you absolute references rather than relative motions.
If you wanted to go in the other direction, you could achieve more productivity with faster mouse skills. The competitive FPS genre has spawned a bunch of aim training tools[0] to improve muscle memory.
How do you remove the travel time for the right hand between the mouse and keyboard. The problem isn't the mousing itself, its the dual input responsibility of the right hand.
Maybe if you're doing a job that doesn't involve typing whatsoever, silly stuff like that competitive FPS adjacent mouse skills might help, but for 99% of us, this is just a complete waste of time.
Replacing software with poor keyboard navigation support with better, more modern alternatives will literally do 10x more for your productivity than faster mouse skills.
Mouse aim training has to be the saddest way to improve productivity I've seen anyone suggest.
I'm astonished by how far those aim trainer tools go haha, and how popular they are. I discovered Aimlabs[1] recently, which seems like the most popular one, and it has 6 000 people playing right now.
As someone who went down the keyboard only blackhole, I've rebounded all the way to mouse maximization. Mice are nice! Another tip that really helped me is embracing good mouse acceleration (i.e. not the Windows or Mac built in garbage). This tool has honestly made using a mouse at least 3x better for me: https://github.com/RawAccelOfficial/rawaccel
I recently tried it but my muscle memory just refused to cope. I used to do a lot of competitve fps gaming and its hard to imagine a different way to hold a house. I do use a kineses ergonomic keyboard though but adapting to that felt much more normal than the mouse stuff idk why
If you wanted to go in the other direction, you could achieve more productivity with faster mouse skills.
I was always in the camp that believed that the keyboard was always faster than mouse for complex workflows.
Then a couple of weeks ago I spent most of a day in a hospital emergency room with someone, and couldn't believe the way those E.R. nurses fly through the menus and options in Epic using just a mouse.
I'm now closer to believing that "muscle memory is muscle memory." But I suspect it only works if the windows appear in the exact same place all the time.
I think muscle memory is a huge part of it. I've seen both the slow hunt and peck sort of folks working on keyboard only apps in auto parts stores and I've seen the guys who can fly through all the screens like a wizard.
you should see people who play competitive fps games fly through windows menus and websites. the reason I think mousing is superior to keyboard is when you attain a high skill level of eye hand coordination, you are completely adaptable to any GUI.
...which supports Vimium-style hints mode as well as the grid-based approach shown in this "Mouseless (app) explained in 80 seconds" video. It also has a very responsive maintainer.
Personally I like vimium's approach much better than the grid. Unfortunately not everything has a good accessibility tree (Zed sadly doesn't), but I just realized loading neru's page that I'm behind in versions. I haven't tried the "Native Vision OCR" addition to hints mode yet.
I also like having a trackpad right on the keyboard (using a SoflePLUS2 right now though I'm not totally sold on column stagger). Then I can use a real pointing device with only a slight movement of one hand. In the Mouseless video, the creator has tried to minimize the distance by putting the mouse between the halves of his keyboard, but I think he's both compromised the keyboard position to ease using the mouse (arms wide and parallel with wrists turned inward rather than arms converging toward a more splayed keyboard with somewhat closer halves, untented to minimize vertical separation compared to the mouse) and might have an uncomfortably small mousepad to avoid doing this even more. Not a compromise I'd want to make.
This one is recursive-grid for Hammerspoon users on macOS, and is probably the easiest of the open source implementations to fully customize. (I made it years ago)
warpd, properly configured, was working perfectly for me.
until i realized i 99% needed it for web surfing. so i switched to kinkHints in firefox, which is covering my link clicking need.
I don't understand why they are not popular at all and only a few manufacturers build them.
It doesn't replace a mouse for me, but the track point is between the G H B keys and can be reached without moving the fingers away from the typing position. So it's great for some simple mouse commands.
Fwiw... (1) Lenovo sells compact keyboards with trackpoint. USB and bluetooth. There are mouse buttons below Space, but it cuts off there, with no pad. I once taped a kludgy bare usb pad to one, which was ok, but the extra couple of cm separation was annoying. I considered grinding out some of the case, but don't recall if that turned out plausible. (2) Lenovo has tablets with detachable keyboards, with both trackpoint and touchpad. People have DIYed such (from an old X1) into a USB kbd - the pogo pins did USB. Lenovo currently sells a replacement kbd for the X12, but I don't know if its similarly DIYable. (3) Assorted other manufacturers make, or have made, kbds with devices resembling touchpoint, more or less. (4) Some note ancient Lenovo IBM SK-8840 PS/2 Wired Keyboard With TrackPoint still show up on ebay, fwiw.
> (1) Lenovo sells compact keyboards with trackpoint
Where can I get it? They stopped selling them around 2 years ago AFAIK. I have a few of them, but they are not very durable, so used ones are probably not a good option.
There are two split-keyboards made by Ultimate Hacking Keyboard [1], UHK 60 and UHK 80, that have an optional trackpoint or trackball module. They're not cheap, though.
There is at least a whole line up of models from Lenovo. But for keyboards there is currently only tex.com.tw that sells new keyboards with track point.
As an old user of thinkpads for years, on a Macbook the trackpad is as much under your thumb as the trackpoint is under your index finger and I find the trackpad far more accurate and less strain to use. In fact, my work-at-home setup is macbook pro, open face so i can use the keyboard+trackpad but external monitor so my posture isn't terrible.
My college ThinkPad laptop had a trackpoint in the keyboard that I never used. The paradigm of "pushing" the cursor around by applying an acceleration vector just never clicked with me. I found the touchpad faster and more accurate/predictable, and learned to be quite proficient with it, so I never used the trackpoint.
It also didn't help that (at least for the T-series of the era) the trackpoint nib had a reputation for causing a bright spot on the LCD within a year or two, from the contact pressure when the lid was closed. I removed the rubber cover to avoid the screen damage, which guaranteed I would never use it.
I get that some people like it, but those are my two reasons for not :)
I didn't say corporations can't have an ugly laptop lineup.
I'm saying that the trend of consumer/business laptop lineups is to make all of them look similar to a MacBook, because that's what most people want. Of course there will always be exceptions, like the ThinkPad.
It is so weird to me, as someone who entered computing before mice were widespread, that we've just let all the interface designers remove keyboard support.
Even mouse-centric platforms like the Macintosh used to have fairly comprehensive keyboard navigation...
It's not weird at all. Keyboards are an obvious power-user mechanic; you have to memorise how to navigate different programs differently, and really even just memorising one program is quite an ask. It is infinitely easier for the average user to work with between one and three input buttons and their eyes than it is to memorise 40 hotkeys + modifier key combinations + chords + modes, so it's simply common sense that as computers expanded from a niche serving 100k nerds into something serving billions of humans, interface design priorities would change. Nerds didn't have the ability to 'let' interface designers do anything; interface designers can just ignore nerds because normal people outnumber nerds by 10000:1.
A while back I had to install a bluetooth mouse on a Mac mini with out existing mouse attached. It was a nightmare only reserved after lots of searching on my phone to enable the accessibility mode setting allowing arrow-based mouse movement.
The System Settings app seemed so incredibly hostile to keyboard navigation. I was able to start it, but tab only moves you in and out of the search window. From there, you can search for Bluetooth, but there seems no way to move from the left-hand menu tab the main contents. Within the main window, there are no buttons unless you hover with... a mouse, and no way to traverse the list via keyboard.
It'd be great to bring back some basic standards for how tab and arrow keys should aid in situations like this. I don't need them all the time, but they'd have saved me a real headache had they been there then.
Thing is, Apple has no standards for keyboard navigation of native UIs to bring back, except if you turn on the accessibility feature I think called “Full Keyboard Access” which is supposed to let you tab to any control instead of only text fields.
The Mac once had zero ability to navigate a dialog without a mouse, other than Enter/Return to do the default button, and Cmd-period (later ESC once it appeared) for cancel). The original Mac also famously had no arrow keys because they were worried developers, if given arrows, would build (or port over) apps that were keyboard-first or which underused the mouse, and they needed the mouse to be a first-class citizen to make the platform truly differentiated.
Windows by contrast started out mouse-optional, so it never lost the keyboard functionality - it’s deeply rooted in the interface’s DNA.
I don't feel like you need this kind of tool on Linux. Just about anything can be done in the terminal, and that is the preferred mouse-free workflow. Using a GUI without a mouse seems antithetical.
Looks kinda similar to https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd/ , which is open source and free software. Always worked very well for me on Wayland, but seems to be working on Xorg and macOS as well.
You just don't get it. It's a critical system tool that's being discussed here. For someone serious about their privacy, it's a valid point. It's not open source nor is from a reputed enterprise. What's preventing the developer from adding a key logger or so?
> What's preventing the developer from adding a key logger or so?
They can log my keys all they want, I would never give a program like this internet access because it has no valid reason to ever connect to the internet (after purchasing a lifetime license). If you're serious about your privacy surely you take a little bit of responsibility for not giving every program you run unfettered access to your system?
Nah, this is a very good point; I've seen things similar to this in the past and it's a cool idea -- but "subscription modeling" every little tool is not a good path to keep going down.
Free and open source is important and it's perfectly fine to be critical here.
Demanding everything be free and open source is important if you don't want independent developers to be able to make a living, and instead wish to create a world where the vast majority of software is controlled by big tech, who are the benefactors of "free" software. The less you're willing to pay people making good software, the more territory predatory ad/tracking-fueled "free" software gets. The more territory you give them, the more they're going to buy out open source software to destroy. We see this happening more and more recently, with uv, bun, vite etc. being bought out - if they can't put food on the table, they will sell out to monopolists.
I agree that I would never pay a subscription fee for any kind of system functionality, but there is a lifetime purchase option available, so there is no grounds to critique that here. Having extra payments models available in addition to a regular purchase model does not make a product worse.
I made a very good living developing open source software for more than a decade. Nothing about open source software precludes one from making money, it's just a different business model from closed source.
A business model that supports a tiny fraction of the market. To the extent there is money in FOSS, even then most of it is provided by the funding of big tech (a whole host of some of the most widely-used FOSS, like Linux, LLVM, Go, Rust, C#, Typescript, VSCode, React, are all obviously corporate-backed). Independent developers who can make a living selling FOSS exist, but are absolutely on the fringe.
Yeah, but I didn't do that. I think I really did mean "little tool" here. This (likely) just isn't the right scale for a pay-to-play project. Obsidian kind of figured this out, but my gut is that this thing is too small.
I push back against people criticising independent software for not being free because I believe it is deeply harmful for our industry. My initial reply didn't have much susbtance, but then neither did the comment I was replying to.
Is it really faster though? I’ve built PoC of something similar and a test game to check how much faster it was to use keyboard. To my surprise mouse was consistently faster ( by a lot).
Yeah, I'm really not sold either on the speed aspect.
I'm using warpd which is a similar tool, and for me it's really not about speed, but more about the comfort of keeping my hands on the keyboard. Still using the mouse a lot but warpd is often handy.
“We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols.
Hence, users achieve a significant productivity increase with the mouse in spite of their subjective experience.
Not that any of the above True Facts will stop the religious wars. And, in fact, I find myself on the opposite side in at least one instance, namely editing. By using Command X, C, and V, the user can select with one hand and act with the other. Two-handed input. Two-handed input can result in solid productivity gains (Buxton 1986).
Command-Key Illusion. Since users do experience the illusion that keyboarding is faster, there is market pressure to supply them with "shortcuts."—even when using "shortcuts" will actually slow them down. What I generally recommend is supplying as many "shortcuts" as demanded by the market—the real market, not the programmer in the cubicle next to you. But only if these "shortcuts" are not to the detriment of the user of the Macintosh visual interface. This leads to two important guidelines:
Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface.
Guideline: The work to design and build the keyboard interface should not sap resources that are needed for the creation of the visual interface.
In other words, don’t rape the primary interface for the benefit of so-called "power-users," who may well end up achieving lower productivity by using the keyboard interface anyway. This is a major problem right now.”
I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as Tog says (for example, I agree with Tog about cut/copy/paste and, historically, command-S for Save (which, with Mac software from the 1980s, you hit very frequently, if you wedding want to lose stuff due to crashes). I also wonder whether do people with decades of vim editor usage really have to attend to basic cursor movement?), but it’s not completely untrue, either.
Wow, nobody mentioned kanata yet? It's literal gamechanger for keymapping literally anything-to-anything, including mouse movement via keyboard. Opensource, cross platform, 7.5k stars on Github.
How do you handle apps that don't have great accessibility support?
Hell - after installing, it shows a slider to help adjust the label size of each element - but I can't slide it because (surprise) Homerow doesn't support horizontal slider elements like this.
I also can't highlight text on the screen etc.
Struggling to find a usecase for Homerow that isn't just navigating chrome or my filesystem.
IMHO, the best I’d seen of mouseless UI was the pentadactyl/vimium/vimperator model (possibly originating with (lynx or elinks somehow) where a hot key was pressed and everything clickable was overlayed with a number allowing a direct click. Obviously simpler than what is being proposed here, but it was my preferred way of using the browser for some time.
Is this different from https://github.com/jbensmann/mouseless ? I am confused since they have the same name and product offering but website seems commercial?
I've tried to use software like this and it looks awesome but it wasn't ultimately the solve for me when it comes to ergonomics.
I used a logitech mx mouse with the palm shape or whatever it's called and I realized that it stopped me from putting more of my hand on the desk, pin pointing the pressure of my hand onto the mouse instead of the desk. What helped dramatically was getting a smaller mouse without that thumb/palm shape (the logitech M720 Triathlon), that distributed more of the pressure onto my desk and I haven't had an issue since.
I hope that helps for anyone having similar ergonomic issues!
That's interesting! I have been using MX for years now (on my third one in 10 years I believe) and there's nothing else that I like. Could you explain what was the issue with the ergonomics? To me it's much better with its gesture features and such. Did you mean it as in wrist pain or?
I wish I liked the MX but I'm not sure if I have bigger than average hands (I don't think so by much!).. I believe the issue is that with putting my hand on the MX mouse the only contact I have with the desk is my wrist and that puts pressure on my wrist.
However with a mouse that doesn't have the thumb support like the MX does, my thumb and left side of my (right) hand distributes more pressure along my hand and down to including my wrist so it distributes the pressure more evenly.
It's also not necessarily just pain but ergonomic uncomfortable in a way that was super distracting, like warning signs that if I kept it up then I'll eventually be in pain.
For a total opposite tool, there is mousemux (Windows only). You can get multiple mice on the same machine and you can attach a keyboard to each and lock it to a window or a screen.
I'm on Linux and totally going to give this a try. I switched from multiple monitors years ago to just a laptop and am in permanent portable mode.
I use the pointer stick exclusively so don't have to reposition my hands on the keyboard like with a track pad, but the pointer stick does keep my hardware choice limited, currently a X1 Yoga. If Mouseless would be faster, then I could get a Framework (no pointer stick available).
Amiga Workbench could be used mouseless by using key combinations to move the mouse around. It was cumbersome, but just good enough to let you use the system if your mouse was broken, or you had plugged a second joystick into the mouse port and couldn't be bothered swapping them to launch a game. Later there were add-ons like Reqtools and MCP which let you use keys more, e.g. Escape to close a window, or Return (Enter) to hit OK on a dialog box.
When I first tried OpenAI’s Atlas browser, I found it incredibly slow at moving the mouse. This could be a perfect use case for agents that need computer use.
I wish there'd be readily available keyboards/pads where one could just use the surface (key surfaces) as the touchpad when fingers brush across on them softly.
I was building an ergo split keyboard and was also interested in this problem. After a bit of searching on the internet, I found this:
https://github.com/vlukash/corne-trackpad
The author used a BlackBerry trackpad. In his blogpost he showed that it can be mounted on top of a keycap. I believe that you can 3d print a special keycap integrate directly with the trackpad.
In the web I use Vimium, I tried mouseless in the past and loved the idea but it just didn't click with me. Now I use a lot a mouse layer in zmk and also a trackball.
I've been building the same thing for a while https://github.com/huytd/octocmd
It has everything you need to throw away the mouse: keyboard tab switching, search and click, vim-style clicking, keyboard scrolling.
Wow, this brings back the memories of a Byte (I think it was Byte) article about how a person used this strange thing (don't know if it was called "mouse" yet) to keep on working after his keyboard died.
I've been using a "hamster" for some time now. Its top surface is a track pad - nice.
I've had "mouseless" on every system since getting a keyboard that supports it (in my case the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard). It's changed my compute experience and I can never go back (so I hope they don't go out of business)
It's interesting, it's true that once you get used to the key combinations everything is more natural and faster, I always used browser shortcuts but never system shortcuts.
i use this! it actually comes in handy when i'm too lazy to move my hands from my keyboard. on my ultrawide, the click zones are larger and easier to digest/hit.
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The way I see it, if you go for keyboard-only approach you aim for efficiency. And then you build a site, that doesn't work without javascript at all. Which is a contradiction if you ask me.
I have a small Logitech laser mouse with a few auxiliary buttons, horizontal click scroll, and an unlock able wheel for fast scrolling. One button opens up workspace view (four fingers up), side scroll switches between works spaces (four fingers sideways). When my laptop is setup on my desk at home with monitor and keyboard attached this is much more comfortable and efficient than using the track pad. That’s said, MacBook track pads are magic.
I have to lift up my hand and move my arm around to use it. With a trackpad all I need to do is move my hand over and flick my fingers for gestures. My wrist never moves.
Sometimes when I am too tired, I lean back in my chair and click through Hacker News or something similar. I use Vimium in my browser and HN is great to navigate with it, but that's the not the point - the whole point is I don't want to sit above my keyboard with my hands on the home row.
I consider myself a "keyboard power user" if this is a thing anyway, and I really dig the home row thing (Vimmer for 20+ years now), but frankly having my hands on the keyboard ALL the time throughout the day is really tiring. So, I actually like my mouse for a change of posture, the cursor that I can follow with my eyes, etc.
P.S. I have to admit, though, that I love even more the interfaces that don't require a mouse in the first place. It's a shame we stopped adding well-thought tab stops in the UI and keyboards shortcuts are just a free-for-all in the apps.
fwiw Ive been using mouseless for a while now and I've been enjoying it! I like how i can remember the regions on the screen and the hotkeys are consistent. I also like that it makes the whole screen clickable not just what the app is able to recognize as a button.
Committed Mouseless user, here. I use a split keyboard that has a mouse layer, but I almost never use it, let alone an actual mouse or trackpad. Mouseless is so much more efficient for me. It did take a day or two to get used to using it (and to get used to comments from people who see your screen when it's active).
This is almost exactly how Windows voice control works. It keeps dividing the screen into smaller and smaller boxes labeled with numbers that you can speak to focus into.
If you have a big form to fill in, surely its going to take longer to type in the coordinates of each text box and get the mouse to click them rather than just hitting tab to select the next input element?
well, you should be able to, at the OS level use only keyboard shortcuts. Windows once was great with tab, enter, escape, but browsers make things more complicated than dialog boxes, and MacOS really isn't good at keyboard shortcuts. I would prefer the solution was not Mouseless and the others, but no mouse.
I prefer ShortCat's model:
https://shortcat.app/
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.
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.
Brilliant, exactly what I need! (I think!)
This looks cool! I’ll have to try it
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
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?
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!
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!
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.
This is purrrfect ;)
I've been looking for something like this
>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.
Have you looked into Sway/i3?
Did you look at the links, these solve a different problem.
Wow, as cool as this is, it's kind of a shame that we need to say "use coords to show where the mouse should click" instead of designing interfaces that keep pointing-device-free users in mind.
With Windows in particular, you absolutely can navigate Windows + Office keyboard only. I do it every day.
Now, third party software, is always going to be all over the place. Stuff that was largely built on Win32 components works fine, but "modern" stylized applications rarely have strong support.
You’re right that lots of Windows apps were designed with Keyboard only workflows in mind. It’s a shame that MacOS has so many points where if you don’t have a mouse you’re out of luck.
There is one major improvement you can do on Mac, at least for menus:
https://varun.ch/posts/macos-keyboard/
Like the linked article says, every time I set up a new Mac, I’m annoyed that this isn’t the default.
I’m annoyed that this isn’t the default.
I really feel like this used to be the default. That's how I always did it in macOS going back to the early 2000's.
Only in the last two versions or so did I notice it was no longer the default. I'm glad to see here that I can now re-enable it.
Edit: I see that I do have it enabled. But for some reason there are a lot of programs where it doesn't seem to work anymore, no matter what the settings. Off the top of my head: Half the Adobe programs I use for work.
I get that this might annoy you, but there is a direct trace all the way back to the original Mac in 1984 that required a mouse. As time went on and the two other OSes we still have gained mouse support (Windows, Linux) from their keyboard roots, they brought forward their ethos of keyboard navigation. Mac OS resolutely stayed attached to its mouse only roots.
It was a significant downside of MacOS from the beginning, and it still is.
That seems incredibly subjective. For people with carpal tunnel like myself, having to do everything on the keyboard can be very painful. The mouse alleviates that and gives visual feedback.
That's a good reason to support the mouse as a backup peripheral, but not a good reason to gimp keyboards in your interface.
Seeing as both can be accommodated, I would argue it's an objective limitation of macOS.
Annoying heritage is still annoying.
“When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
Well Tim, I suppose the blind do outnumber the handless.
Obviously depends on your workflow but I think I use mouse only on websites on macos (with aerospace)
If you're interested in keyboard navigation of websites, consider a browser or extension with link hinting support! It worked really well in my experience a few years ago, although I've since became much more of a mouse guy and stopped using it.
Qutebrowser was my favorite browser for keyboard navigation but firefox, chrome, etc. have extensions for this as well.
Vimium extension does that. Works well too. Works on Chrome and Firefox.
try out surfingkeys if vimmium isnt ur cup of tea
Link hinting - love it
Most things in Linux too - all DEs I have tried have lots of keyboard shortcuts and so do a lot of applications.
The problem is that they are less discoverable and you need to make and effort to get used to using them instead of point and click.
They used to be discoverable with mnemonics (underlined letters) but those have been dead nearly thirty years…
these still exist on windows though? you just hold alt
Only works for like 20% of the menus though. I remember alt shortcuts reliably being on every single menu in early Windows (95? ME? XP?)
They died when people stopped using native toolkits and started making everything an electron app.
Economics be damned, if you're going to make a native app, use the OS provided toolkits.
Hah, I was thinking 3.1…
Yeah I only used it a little bit so couldn't remember if it had the "hold alt to see shortcuts" thing
I remember using TweakUI to enable "always show underline for shortcut key" because that genuinely felt like it should be a default for better usability.
GTK (and QT I do believe) also support this on GNU/Linux.
I wouldn't say they're dead, just more hidden (e.g. GTK4 only shows them when you hold Alt). AFAIK most toolkits still support them, but app developers also have to actually define them.
> you absolutely can navigate Windows + Office keyboard only
Unfortunately in Excel many operations can be done only with the function keys (e.g. F2, Shift-F8). I'd argue that leaving the center of the keyboard to press the function keys is not easier or quicker than reaching for the mouse.
On macOS with "Full Keyboard Control" you can navigate the system and most any official app from the keyboard. It's not an efficient experience though.
I just wish the shortcuts between the OS and Office were consistent. Most are, but some of the more commonly used ones aren't.
But that's the point for me. Unlike e.g. Vimium, this thing is not limited to clicking clicky things, but allows to imitate nearly arbitrary mouse movements, very quickly. There are cases when it's important.
> designing interfaces that keep pointing-device-free users in mind.
Agreed. Using keyboard keys to emulate a mouse cursor seems like it ought to be a last resort for graphical applications that lack proper accessibility affordances.
Contrast that with command palettes, accessibility controls, syntax tree navigation, and other approaches that rely on the names, content, and document structure that users already know rather than a special mode that displays two letter codes that must be read each time or memorized. Many of these other approaches also allow users to activate buttons, menu items, and links that are outside the current viewport or hidden in menus which reduces the overall number of "clicks" required to perform those actions. The downside is that they can take longer to type than a two-letter code. Still, my guess is that for most people it would be overall more efficient to optimize for cognitive load than pure speed.
(Though in the long run, I suspect that improvements in eye-tracking will lead to hybrid systems that are both lower cognitive load and faster than any of these.)
A tiled window manager with Qutebrowser and it's vimium style shortcuts is the closest I have come to this.
I just hit tab 1 to N times and hope for the best. I wonder if VIM style search on elements with a new HTML tag attribute would work (at least for browsers).
Wait until you hear about tab+shift.
It would be great if they built Vim style shortcuts into the spec and browser like you suggested but in the time being we have the Vimium extensions for other browsers. Personally I am not a fan of extensions unless I write them myself.
I'm curious if there's a program that uses a simple detection model for UX components to locate clickable areas. This would allow for global navigation similar to VimiumC
https://www.homerow.com/
Been using this for years.
Wow, how I have I never heard of this, this seems like a way better model than mouseless
Sorry, I forgot to add "on Linux" at the end. Still, that's a nice one!
I think it's ok that hardware and software are designed with the 99% in mind. After that you probably run into competing interests/trade-offs anyway (a system built for ergonomics probably looks different from a system built for speed).
I think it's ok that hardware and software are designed with the 99% in mind.
That's called mob rule. We don't act like cavemen anymore. We build entire civilizations to prevent that sort of thing. You may have read in a history book once "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
The word "all" is important.
I think the controller interfaces for FFXIV is worth a study in this. They designed an interface that is workable for an MMORPG with both mouse and controller (in this case, the controller can act as a proxy for our keyboard).
if anything, I'd want LESS keyboard controls
more GUI, more visibility!
> interfaces that keep pointing-device-free users
There's plenty of TUIs for the dozens of you to use.
Monthly subscriptions for software like this confuse me. The website also obscures that it's paid at all - the first option is "download for X", then the next option is a red button to "unlock". No pricing link/page, nothing. Aimed at getting you to download and use it, then fork up later.
References mentioned all going on about productivity etc. Red flags all-round.
You click on the Unlock button, and it tells you pricing for monthly, annual, or lifetime. Not exactly rocket science.
- app named Mouseless
- need to CLICK on Unlock to show pricing
(just thought it was funny)
Hey genius just click the big red unlock button that you already mentioned yourself
Keynav – retire your mouse (2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945936
Wayland port: https://github.com/kovetskiy/waynav
I like wl-kbptr myself: https://github.com/moverest/wl-kbptr
Great demo videos. Very intelligent selection methods.
Windows version: https://github.com/lesderid/keynavish
Mouseless website totally forgets to sell the product. Had to dig into the docs to understand how its used, what is offers.
The video shows it, but it takes a bit of effort to grok. They could use some explanatory graphics.
Also, not OSS but $49 for a lifetime license. I suppose that I could spend less on tokens to repro the idea for my private use. I like the idea.
Some existing similar tools for those who might be curious.
For vim, there's easymotion or hop.nvim.
For tmux, there's Morantron/tmux-fingers.
For Chrome, there's Vimium.
You can also flash your keyboard to have mouse controls (https://docs.qmk.fm/features/mouse_keys).
Huh, people use the mouse with vim? Or am I missing something?
For Vim it isn’t replacing mouse necessarily. It’s giving you another way to navigate the cursor around the buffer by giving you absolute references rather than relative motions.
:bow: thanks!
If you wanted to go in the other direction, you could achieve more productivity with faster mouse skills. The competitive FPS genre has spawned a bunch of aim training tools[0] to improve muscle memory.
[0] https://www.3daimtrainer.com/
How do you remove the travel time for the right hand between the mouse and keyboard. The problem isn't the mousing itself, its the dual input responsibility of the right hand.
Maybe if you're doing a job that doesn't involve typing whatsoever, silly stuff like that competitive FPS adjacent mouse skills might help, but for 99% of us, this is just a complete waste of time.
Replacing software with poor keyboard navigation support with better, more modern alternatives will literally do 10x more for your productivity than faster mouse skills.
Mouse aim training has to be the saddest way to improve productivity I've seen anyone suggest.
I'm astonished by how far those aim trainer tools go haha, and how popular they are. I discovered Aimlabs[1] recently, which seems like the most popular one, and it has 6 000 people playing right now.
For us keyboard geeks, there is monkeytype: https://monkeytype.com/
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/714010/Aimlabs/
As someone who went down the keyboard only blackhole, I've rebounded all the way to mouse maximization. Mice are nice! Another tip that really helped me is embracing good mouse acceleration (i.e. not the Windows or Mac built in garbage). This tool has honestly made using a mouse at least 3x better for me: https://github.com/RawAccelOfficial/rawaccel
RIP my hand by RSI
A few months ago I switched to a vertical mouse and can’t recommend it enough.
I couldn't adapt to the fact that, when I click, I have to be mindful of not moving the mouse sideways with the right amount of finger pressure.
I recently tried it but my muscle memory just refused to cope. I used to do a lot of competitve fps gaming and its hard to imagine a different way to hold a house. I do use a kineses ergonomic keyboard though but adapting to that felt much more normal than the mouse stuff idk why
to make mouse movement faster, you could write an app that uses the keyboard to move the mouse to a certain quadrant for you
If you wanted to go in the other direction, you could achieve more productivity with faster mouse skills.
I was always in the camp that believed that the keyboard was always faster than mouse for complex workflows.
Then a couple of weeks ago I spent most of a day in a hospital emergency room with someone, and couldn't believe the way those E.R. nurses fly through the menus and options in Epic using just a mouse.
I'm now closer to believing that "muscle memory is muscle memory." But I suspect it only works if the windows appear in the exact same place all the time.
I think muscle memory is a huge part of it. I've seen both the slow hunt and peck sort of folks working on keyboard only apps in auto parts stores and I've seen the guys who can fly through all the screens like a wizard.
you should see people who play competitive fps games fly through windows menus and websites. the reason I think mousing is superior to keyboard is when you attain a high skill level of eye hand coordination, you are completely adaptable to any GUI.
Opensource alternatives:
- https://github.com/moverest/wl-kbptr
- https://github.com/petoncle/mousemaster
- https://github.com/y3owk1n/neru
- https://github.com/mjrusso/scoot
- https://github.com/jbensmann/mouseless
- https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd (not really maintained anymore)
> https://github.com/y3owk1n/neru
...which supports Vimium-style hints mode as well as the grid-based approach shown in this "Mouseless (app) explained in 80 seconds" video. It also has a very responsive maintainer.
Personally I like vimium's approach much better than the grid. Unfortunately not everything has a good accessibility tree (Zed sadly doesn't), but I just realized loading neru's page that I'm behind in versions. I haven't tried the "Native Vision OCR" addition to hints mode yet.
I also like having a trackpad right on the keyboard (using a SoflePLUS2 right now though I'm not totally sold on column stagger). Then I can use a real pointing device with only a slight movement of one hand. In the Mouseless video, the creator has tried to minimize the distance by putting the mouse between the halves of his keyboard, but I think he's both compromised the keyboard position to ease using the mouse (arms wide and parallel with wrists turned inward rather than arms converging toward a more splayed keyboard with somewhat closer halves, untented to minimize vertical separation compared to the mouse) and might have an uncomfortably small mousepad to avoid doing this even more. Not a compromise I'd want to make.
https://github.com/msolomon/griddle
This one is recursive-grid for Hammerspoon users on macOS, and is probably the easiest of the open source implementations to fully customize. (I made it years ago)
Another new one is stochos: https://github.com/museslabs/stochos
Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors/maintainers.
Shortcat is the one I found I was willing to adopt without much effort: https://shortcat.app
warpd, properly configured, was working perfectly for me. until i realized i 99% needed it for web surfing. so i switched to kinkHints in firefox, which is covering my link clicking need.
I still have a keyboard with a track point
I don't understand why they are not popular at all and only a few manufacturers build them.
It doesn't replace a mouse for me, but the track point is between the G H B keys and can be reached without moving the fingers away from the typing position. So it's great for some simple mouse commands.
The trackpoint is the main reason I find it so hard to move away from Lenovo Thinkpads. The buttons under the spacebar alone are super convenient.
Not just hard - impossible. To the point of making it harder to find a job, as very few jobs let you use a non-Windows ThinkPad.
(I mean yeah, of course AuDHD makes it harder to find a job, no surprise there. But it's a shame that laptop manufacturers make it even harder.)
> To the point of making it harder to find a job
Fwiw... (1) Lenovo sells compact keyboards with trackpoint. USB and bluetooth. There are mouse buttons below Space, but it cuts off there, with no pad. I once taped a kludgy bare usb pad to one, which was ok, but the extra couple of cm separation was annoying. I considered grinding out some of the case, but don't recall if that turned out plausible. (2) Lenovo has tablets with detachable keyboards, with both trackpoint and touchpad. People have DIYed such (from an old X1) into a USB kbd - the pogo pins did USB. Lenovo currently sells a replacement kbd for the X12, but I don't know if its similarly DIYable. (3) Assorted other manufacturers make, or have made, kbds with devices resembling touchpoint, more or less. (4) Some note ancient Lenovo IBM SK-8840 PS/2 Wired Keyboard With TrackPoint still show up on ebay, fwiw.
> (1) Lenovo sells compact keyboards with trackpoint
Where can I get it? They stopped selling them around 2 years ago AFAIK. I have a few of them, but they are not very durable, so used ones are probably not a good option.
Only alternative I know of is https://tex.com.tw
There are two split-keyboards made by Ultimate Hacking Keyboard [1], UHK 60 and UHK 80, that have an optional trackpoint or trackball module. They're not cheap, though.
[1]: https://uhk.io/
> They stopped selling them
Ouch. Thanks for the catch.
On ebay just now, there's someone claiming they have "more than 10 available".
Dell and HP had trackpoints once (I had a HP one), maybe they still do.
This. When I use my work laptop, I find myself pressing the spacebar constantly. edit: instead of "clicking"
There is at least a whole line up of models from Lenovo. But for keyboards there is currently only tex.com.tw that sells new keyboards with track point.
As an old user of thinkpads for years, on a Macbook the trackpad is as much under your thumb as the trackpoint is under your index finger and I find the trackpad far more accurate and less strain to use. In fact, my work-at-home setup is macbook pro, open face so i can use the keyboard+trackpad but external monitor so my posture isn't terrible.
My college ThinkPad laptop had a trackpoint in the keyboard that I never used. The paradigm of "pushing" the cursor around by applying an acceleration vector just never clicked with me. I found the touchpad faster and more accurate/predictable, and learned to be quite proficient with it, so I never used the trackpoint.
It also didn't help that (at least for the T-series of the era) the trackpoint nib had a reputation for causing a bright spot on the LCD within a year or two, from the contact pressure when the lid was closed. I removed the rubber cover to avoid the screen damage, which guaranteed I would never use it.
I get that some people like it, but those are my two reasons for not :)
> I don't understand why they are not popular at all and only a few manufacturers build them.
Because they are ugly, just like ThinkPads that include them.
Beauty is in the eye of the chonky laptop holder.
I couldn't care less how ugly my keyboard is.
Sure, but normal people care about aesthetics, and unsurprisingly big corporations cater to that.
So Lenovo puts trackpoints on their ThinkPads, which is ugly. Also, big corporations cater to aesthetics. Which is it?
I didn't say corporations can't have an ugly laptop lineup.
I'm saying that the trend of consumer/business laptop lineups is to make all of them look similar to a MacBook, because that's what most people want. Of course there will always be exceptions, like the ThinkPad.
I'm not even interested so much on laptop keyboards. I always work on my desktop setup with an external keyboard.
It's really hard to get an external keyboard with a track point. For laptops there are a lot of models to chose from, both used and new.
I think I prefer the approach that Homerow uses: https://www.homerow.com/
It's like vimium but for your entire mac. It hooks into the macOS accessibility APIs.
lol, it's Vimium for the OS! that's pretty cool
It is so weird to me, as someone who entered computing before mice were widespread, that we've just let all the interface designers remove keyboard support.
Even mouse-centric platforms like the Macintosh used to have fairly comprehensive keyboard navigation...
It's not weird at all. Keyboards are an obvious power-user mechanic; you have to memorise how to navigate different programs differently, and really even just memorising one program is quite an ask. It is infinitely easier for the average user to work with between one and three input buttons and their eyes than it is to memorise 40 hotkeys + modifier key combinations + chords + modes, so it's simply common sense that as computers expanded from a niche serving 100k nerds into something serving billions of humans, interface design priorities would change. Nerds didn't have the ability to 'let' interface designers do anything; interface designers can just ignore nerds because normal people outnumber nerds by 10000:1.
A while back I had to install a bluetooth mouse on a Mac mini with out existing mouse attached. It was a nightmare only reserved after lots of searching on my phone to enable the accessibility mode setting allowing arrow-based mouse movement.
The System Settings app seemed so incredibly hostile to keyboard navigation. I was able to start it, but tab only moves you in and out of the search window. From there, you can search for Bluetooth, but there seems no way to move from the left-hand menu tab the main contents. Within the main window, there are no buttons unless you hover with... a mouse, and no way to traverse the list via keyboard.
It'd be great to bring back some basic standards for how tab and arrow keys should aid in situations like this. I don't need them all the time, but they'd have saved me a real headache had they been there then.
Thing is, Apple has no standards for keyboard navigation of native UIs to bring back, except if you turn on the accessibility feature I think called “Full Keyboard Access” which is supposed to let you tab to any control instead of only text fields.
The Mac once had zero ability to navigate a dialog without a mouse, other than Enter/Return to do the default button, and Cmd-period (later ESC once it appeared) for cancel). The original Mac also famously had no arrow keys because they were worried developers, if given arrows, would build (or port over) apps that were keyboard-first or which underused the mouse, and they needed the mouse to be a first-class citizen to make the platform truly differentiated.
Windows by contrast started out mouse-optional, so it never lost the keyboard functionality - it’s deeply rooted in the interface’s DNA.
> Thing is, Apple has no standards for keyboard navigation of native UIs to bring back
Huh? All menus and dialogs on Mac are navigable by keyboard. I don't recall a time when they weren't.
Unfortunately none of the necessary keyboard shortcuts are actually called out in the UI (we long for the days of Keys! on OS9)
Apple UI is dire for keyboard. Never been able to drive it.
Windows is regressing as well. Some of the modern UI stuff is impossible. Think it was good around windows 7 era and that was it.
I like https://www.homerow.app/
I like tools that reduce context switching. Curious how steep the learning curve is for daily use.
I don't feel like you need this kind of tool on Linux. Just about anything can be done in the terminal, and that is the preferred mouse-free workflow. Using a GUI without a mouse seems antithetical.
Looks kinda similar to https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd/ , which is open source and free software. Always worked very well for me on Wayland, but seems to be working on Xorg and macOS as well.
Using closed source software to drive my OS doesn't sound that appealing to me.
Then don't buy it. Not everything in the world needs to be made free just for you.
You just don't get it. It's a critical system tool that's being discussed here. For someone serious about their privacy, it's a valid point. It's not open source nor is from a reputed enterprise. What's preventing the developer from adding a key logger or so?
> What's preventing the developer from adding a key logger or so?
They can log my keys all they want, I would never give a program like this internet access because it has no valid reason to ever connect to the internet (after purchasing a lifetime license). If you're serious about your privacy surely you take a little bit of responsibility for not giving every program you run unfettered access to your system?
Nah, this is a very good point; I've seen things similar to this in the past and it's a cool idea -- but "subscription modeling" every little tool is not a good path to keep going down.
Free and open source is important and it's perfectly fine to be critical here.
Demanding everything be free and open source is important if you don't want independent developers to be able to make a living, and instead wish to create a world where the vast majority of software is controlled by big tech, who are the benefactors of "free" software. The less you're willing to pay people making good software, the more territory predatory ad/tracking-fueled "free" software gets. The more territory you give them, the more they're going to buy out open source software to destroy. We see this happening more and more recently, with uv, bun, vite etc. being bought out - if they can't put food on the table, they will sell out to monopolists.
I agree that I would never pay a subscription fee for any kind of system functionality, but there is a lifetime purchase option available, so there is no grounds to critique that here. Having extra payments models available in addition to a regular purchase model does not make a product worse.
I made a very good living developing open source software for more than a decade. Nothing about open source software precludes one from making money, it's just a different business model from closed source.
A business model that supports a tiny fraction of the market. To the extent there is money in FOSS, even then most of it is provided by the funding of big tech (a whole host of some of the most widely-used FOSS, like Linux, LLVM, Go, Rust, C#, Typescript, VSCode, React, are all obviously corporate-backed). Independent developers who can make a living selling FOSS exist, but are absolutely on the fringe.
Yeah, but I didn't do that. I think I really did mean "little tool" here. This (likely) just isn't the right scale for a pay-to-play project. Obsidian kind of figured this out, but my gut is that this thing is too small.
i bought it for like 4 bucks several months ago. for the price (and subscription tier) i'm seeing now, i wouldn't say it's worth it.
If you don’t like their opinion, you don’t have to respond. Not every opinion you disagree with on the internet requires a response from you.
If you don't like my opinion, you don't have to respond. Yet you chose to anyways. Curious.
I didn’t say I didn’t like your opinion. Just responding in the same manner you treated someone else.
I push back against people criticising independent software for not being free because I believe it is deeply harmful for our industry. My initial reply didn't have much susbtance, but then neither did the comment I was replying to.
I’m confused because I don’t see anything about cost in the opinion you responded to.
If you're on Linux, mouseless [0] may work well for you.
[0] https://github.com/jbensmann/mouseless
May not work with bluetooth keyboard (debian 13).
Yeah, feels kinda weird to think about using a mouse pointer utility with licensing DRM.
Is it really faster though? I’ve built PoC of something similar and a test game to check how much faster it was to use keyboard. To my surprise mouse was consistently faster ( by a lot).
Yeah, I'm really not sold either on the speed aspect.
I'm using warpd which is a similar tool, and for me it's really not about speed, but more about the comfort of keeping my hands on the keyboard. Still using the mouse a lot but warpd is often handy.
https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html:
“We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols.
Hence, users achieve a significant productivity increase with the mouse in spite of their subjective experience.
Not that any of the above True Facts will stop the religious wars. And, in fact, I find myself on the opposite side in at least one instance, namely editing. By using Command X, C, and V, the user can select with one hand and act with the other. Two-handed input. Two-handed input can result in solid productivity gains (Buxton 1986).
Command-Key Illusion. Since users do experience the illusion that keyboarding is faster, there is market pressure to supply them with "shortcuts."—even when using "shortcuts" will actually slow them down. What I generally recommend is supplying as many "shortcuts" as demanded by the market—the real market, not the programmer in the cubicle next to you. But only if these "shortcuts" are not to the detriment of the user of the Macintosh visual interface. This leads to two important guidelines:
Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface.
Guideline: The work to design and build the keyboard interface should not sap resources that are needed for the creation of the visual interface.
In other words, don’t rape the primary interface for the benefit of so-called "power-users," who may well end up achieving lower productivity by using the keyboard interface anyway. This is a major problem right now.”
I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as Tog says (for example, I agree with Tog about cut/copy/paste and, historically, command-S for Save (which, with Mac software from the 1980s, you hit very frequently, if you wedding want to lose stuff due to crashes). I also wonder whether do people with decades of vim editor usage really have to attend to basic cursor movement?), but it’s not completely untrue, either.
Wow, nobody mentioned kanata yet? It's literal gamechanger for keymapping literally anything-to-anything, including mouse movement via keyboard. Opensource, cross platform, 7.5k stars on Github.
Anyone interested in this should really try out Homerow (https://www.homerow.app)
(not affiliated, just a happy user for years now)
How do you handle apps that don't have great accessibility support?
Hell - after installing, it shows a slider to help adjust the label size of each element - but I can't slide it because (surprise) Homerow doesn't support horizontal slider elements like this.
I also can't highlight text on the screen etc.
Struggling to find a usecase for Homerow that isn't just navigating chrome or my filesystem.
But that is Mac only.
https://gitHub.com/AlfredoSequeida/hints
I recently installed https://www.neverclick.com/ (windows only), which also offers an "intelligent" mode that detects possible clickable zones
Sounds like Vimium for the whole UI, nice.
IMHO, the best I’d seen of mouseless UI was the pentadactyl/vimium/vimperator model (possibly originating with (lynx or elinks somehow) where a hot key was pressed and everything clickable was overlayed with a number allowing a direct click. Obviously simpler than what is being proposed here, but it was my preferred way of using the browser for some time.
Tridactyl is alive and kicking for Firefox today?
I guess it can solve the problem of navigating mouse for AI agents as keys are more objectively determinant.
Mouse-only when
Is this different from https://github.com/jbensmann/mouseless ? I am confused since they have the same name and product offering but website seems commercial?
I've tried to use software like this and it looks awesome but it wasn't ultimately the solve for me when it comes to ergonomics.
I used a logitech mx mouse with the palm shape or whatever it's called and I realized that it stopped me from putting more of my hand on the desk, pin pointing the pressure of my hand onto the mouse instead of the desk. What helped dramatically was getting a smaller mouse without that thumb/palm shape (the logitech M720 Triathlon), that distributed more of the pressure onto my desk and I haven't had an issue since.
I hope that helps for anyone having similar ergonomic issues!
That's interesting! I have been using MX for years now (on my third one in 10 years I believe) and there's nothing else that I like. Could you explain what was the issue with the ergonomics? To me it's much better with its gesture features and such. Did you mean it as in wrist pain or?
I wish I liked the MX but I'm not sure if I have bigger than average hands (I don't think so by much!).. I believe the issue is that with putting my hand on the MX mouse the only contact I have with the desk is my wrist and that puts pressure on my wrist.
However with a mouse that doesn't have the thumb support like the MX does, my thumb and left side of my (right) hand distributes more pressure along my hand and down to including my wrist so it distributes the pressure more evenly.
It's also not necessarily just pain but ergonomic uncomfortable in a way that was super distracting, like warning signs that if I kept it up then I'll eventually be in pain.
saying it is for Linux made me think it would be open source as there are already lot of things people can do without mouse...
There is an extensive list of window managers, like Sway or I3, file managers like Vifm and Ranger and browsers like Luakit.
For a total opposite tool, there is mousemux (Windows only). You can get multiple mice on the same machine and you can attach a keyboard to each and lock it to a window or a screen.
Whoa! Now that's interesting! I wonder if that would be possible on other OSes...
It can be done on Linux with X11 using xinput.
I'm on Linux and totally going to give this a try. I switched from multiple monitors years ago to just a laptop and am in permanent portable mode.
I use the pointer stick exclusively so don't have to reposition my hands on the keyboard like with a track pad, but the pointer stick does keep my hardware choice limited, currently a X1 Yoga. If Mouseless would be faster, then I could get a Framework (no pointer stick available).
I'd gladly pay the $50 for lifetime.
Amiga Workbench could be used mouseless by using key combinations to move the mouse around. It was cumbersome, but just good enough to let you use the system if your mouse was broken, or you had plugged a second joystick into the mouse port and couldn't be bothered swapping them to launch a game. Later there were add-ons like Reqtools and MCP which let you use keys more, e.g. Escape to close a window, or Return (Enter) to hit OK on a dialog box.
It's amazing!!! This will save my right wrist from chronic pain.
When I first tried OpenAI’s Atlas browser, I found it incredibly slow at moving the mouse. This could be a perfect use case for agents that need computer use.
I wish there'd be readily available keyboards/pads where one could just use the surface (key surfaces) as the touchpad when fingers brush across on them softly.
I was building an ergo split keyboard and was also interested in this problem. After a bit of searching on the internet, I found this: https://github.com/vlukash/corne-trackpad
The author used a BlackBerry trackpad. In his blogpost he showed that it can be mounted on top of a keycap. I believe that you can 3d print a special keycap integrate directly with the trackpad.
In the web I use Vimium, I tried mouseless in the past and loved the idea but it just didn't click with me. Now I use a lot a mouse layer in zmk and also a trackball.
I've been building the same thing for a while https://github.com/huytd/octocmd It has everything you need to throw away the mouse: keyboard tab switching, search and click, vim-style clicking, keyboard scrolling.
Wow, this brings back the memories of a Byte (I think it was Byte) article about how a person used this strange thing (don't know if it was called "mouse" yet) to keep on working after his keyboard died.
I've been using a "hamster" for some time now. Its top surface is a track pad - nice.
Is this copied from Emacs "avy" package?
Related. Others?
Mouseless – fast mouse control with the keyboard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42396336 - Dec 2024 (120 comments)
I've had "mouseless" on every system since getting a keyboard that supports it (in my case the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard). It's changed my compute experience and I can never go back (so I hope they don't go out of business)
I’ve never seen anything like this. Really cool to see a UX that is totally novel.
So you have to memorize key coordinates like it's Battleship? idgi
Trackpoints are the best for don't-look-down.
It's interesting, it's true that once you get used to the key combinations everything is more natural and faster, I always used browser shortcuts but never system shortcuts.
Reminds me of AceJump for JetBrains IDEs:
https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7086-acejump
X have built in mouseless mouse, via numpad
+ some magic combination mostly "shift+numlock" to enable thisDoes Mouseless support multiple monitors?
I have been trying out similar software for a few years but haven't seen one that would let me "click" outside the main monitor on Windows.
There are 2 beautiful windows app which are free and does everything this does.
https://github.com/pit-ray/win-vind
https://github.com/adirh3/Fluent-Search
i use this! it actually comes in handy when i'm too lazy to move my hands from my keyboard. on my ultrawide, the click zones are larger and easier to digest/hit.
I can only imagine how horrifyingly good at FPS games this will make me
There is something to be said for the split mechanical keyboard in the demonstration video and the sound the switches make when 'moving the mouse'.
I do not see the contradiction: it is a keyboard-only tool for dynamic GUIs, just like that website with JS.
Does anyone use a trackpoint and has still compared to this? I get it’s faster then reaching to mouse, but faster then trackpoint?
I use a trackpad to avoid virtually all of the issues created by a mouse. The trackpad gestures in macOS are magical.
I have a small Logitech laser mouse with a few auxiliary buttons, horizontal click scroll, and an unlock able wheel for fast scrolling. One button opens up workspace view (four fingers up), side scroll switches between works spaces (four fingers sideways). When my laptop is setup on my desk at home with monitor and keyboard attached this is much more comfortable and efficient than using the track pad. That’s said, MacBook track pads are magic.
What are the issues that a mouse creates?
I have to lift up my hand and move my arm around to use it. With a trackpad all I need to do is move my hand over and flick my fingers for gestures. My wrist never moves.
Wait till you hear about a trackpoint. To bad almost nothing comes with one anymore.
As someone on a mac trackpad right now, the only gesture I somewhat regularly use is drag-and-drop. Everything else I'd rather do on the keyboard.
Takes time to move your hand to it.
Sometimes when I am too tired, I lean back in my chair and click through Hacker News or something similar. I use Vimium in my browser and HN is great to navigate with it, but that's the not the point - the whole point is I don't want to sit above my keyboard with my hands on the home row.
I consider myself a "keyboard power user" if this is a thing anyway, and I really dig the home row thing (Vimmer for 20+ years now), but frankly having my hands on the keyboard ALL the time throughout the day is really tiring. So, I actually like my mouse for a change of posture, the cursor that I can follow with my eyes, etc.
P.S. I have to admit, though, that I love even more the interfaces that don't require a mouse in the first place. It's a shame we stopped adding well-thought tab stops in the UI and keyboards shortcuts are just a free-for-all in the apps.
Vimium for the browser solves most of the mouse needs. I dont see it helping with drawings.
Did anyone notice the use of the mouse at the end?
https://www.homerow.com/
Homerow is like vimium but for your entire mac.
Indeed or https://tridactyl.xyz
VimFX + LegacyFox is still the best; it even works on about: pages.
fwiw Ive been using mouseless for a while now and I've been enjoying it! I like how i can remember the regions on the screen and the hotkeys are consistent. I also like that it makes the whole screen clickable not just what the app is able to recognize as a button.
I was literally just thinking about the desire to have a mouseless keyboard solution yesterday.
Thanks, but I'm too old to switch - will wait for the Neuralink implant.
This just made me realize my desktop monitor needs to be a touchscreen
Just crashes for me on Wayland :/
Pretty cool, would have been great before the trackpad.
Has anyone real-life experience with these tools?
Committed Mouseless user, here. I use a split keyboard that has a mouse layer, but I almost never use it, let alone an actual mouse or trackpad. Mouseless is so much more efficient for me. It did take a day or two to get used to using it (and to get used to comments from people who see your screen when it's active).
One to two days only? Might have to try it out then.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Thank you! That's exactly what I wanted to hear :)
Never found how to make something like open contextual menu on Mac. It's interface is so inferior to everything else on so many concrete cases.
I mostly use the browser and the ide; ide shortcuts already figured out for the browser i use vimium extension
i3wm with bindings in config to use xdotool to move and click the mouse is what i use.
This is a helpful method for visually grounding LLMs to take actions on the screen such as clicking. For humans though, hell no.
you know what's efficient? controlling a computer with one hand rather than two.
Sure, you can play with yourself and scroll porn that way. I don't know if I'd call that efficiency.
i spent more than year with ergo split keyboards, home row mods, layers, etc. Mouse + speech-to-text + agents made it irrelevant.
This is almost exactly how Windows voice control works. It keeps dividing the screen into smaller and smaller boxes labeled with numbers that you can speak to focus into.
Waiting for the AutoHotKey or AHK with an LLM, GUI automation, and screenshots. Someone else develop it because it will be ignored if I do it.
not working on fedora 44
doesnt work with multiple monitors
just in case you didnt know, theres a kb shortcut to switch the overlay to the next/previous monitor.
nice - stick that video in the header
I was trying to scroll with mouse wheel but the website did not react at all. Then it started scrolling with 1 frame per second.
good one
Can someone who hates/chooses not to use a mouse please explain to me why.
Like I can understand people with disabilities that makes sense so that’s not what I’m talking about
I’m talking about people who are actively choosing to be keyboard only, especially in extremely technical roles
Or you could use tab, arrow keys, page up/down, enter...
That's OK in menus and the OS in general but if you're working on a web app or big form tabbing through it can be a PITA.
Let me introduce you to https://tridactyl.xyz
If you have a big form to fill in, surely its going to take longer to type in the coordinates of each text box and get the mouse to click them rather than just hitting tab to select the next input element?
well, you should be able to, at the OS level use only keyboard shortcuts. Windows once was great with tab, enter, escape, but browsers make things more complicated than dialog boxes, and MacOS really isn't good at keyboard shortcuts. I would prefer the solution was not Mouseless and the others, but no mouse.