[howto] Click the mouse cursor with your keyboard

Do you like your tiling wm? Your vi-like navigation? Do you want to click the mouse cursor, with your keyboard?

Sure you do! Especially when there are web sites that steal your cursor focus, and stops your fingers from being keyboard-happy.

Keynav let's us click the mouse cursor via the keyboard

The version in the repos (version 0.20100403.2754-1) is buggy, in that the left-click does not seem to work in some cases; like on my Openbox machine. So we compile the latest.

Get the sources for keynav and it's dependency, xdotool:

xdotool - https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool
keynav - https://github.com/jordansissel/keynav

Build the xdotool dependency:

tar -xvf xdotool* && cd xdotool*

# build
make && sudo make install

build keynav:

tar -xvf keynav* && cd keynav*

# build
make

# copy the binary to our local system path
sudo cp keynav /usr/local/bin/

# copy the config file into our home
cp keynavrc ~/.keynavrc

.keynavrc contains all the keybindings for your reading pleasure. By default [ctrl+semicolon] to start keynav, with hjkl movement to position the mouse cursor, [space] to click and [semicolon] to hover.

One suggestion I can make in .keynavrc, is the bindings for keys 1, 2 and 3 which click left, middle and right respectively. They need to be rebound to work as we expect:

1 warp,click 1,end
2 warp,click 2,end
3 warp,click 3,end

Enjoy

Last edited by kbmonkey (2012-02-06 15:59:37)