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One Week: No Mouse, Just Keyboard
jfruhlinger writes "Anyone in tech has heard from grousing old-timers who believe the GUI was the beginning of the end of civilization and that EMacs keyboard shortcuts are all the interface anyone should need. But can someone use a modern consumer OS without laying hands on a mouse? Kevin Purdy gave it a week-long try."
I had an adviser who was blind, the only was he could access his computer was a combination screen reader + keyboard. I cannot imagine the number of things he is cut-off from due to a lack of support for keyboards.
If you aren't on friendly terms with your mouse I would recommend the conkeror web browser. This has saved me quite some hazzle in situations where I either don't have a mouse (my TV computer) or when the mouse is awkward to use (my laptop with a substandard trackpad).
For those who don't know, conkeror is a web browser based on xulrunner which is designed to be used in an effective manner without a mouse. If you happen to like emacs, you'll probably feel right at home since the keybindings (by default) are inspired by emacs. If you are not familiar with emacs you will probably need some more time to get used to conkeror. However, since conkeror allows you to use a mouse as well if you want to you can adapt to the browser without feeling too handicapped.
If this seems interesting you can find more information about conkeror at http://conkeror.org/.
Windows is FAR better than Linux in the run-the-GUI-with-keyboard-only department. Sure, Linux has a better console environment, but these keyboard jockeys utterly failed at keyboard jockeying their graphical programs.
I liked the Amiga's solution: Holding down one of the Amiga keyboard buttons turned the cursor keys into a virtual mouse, with Enter or Space or something representing the mouse buttons. A very simple solution when some program didn't have a keyboard shortcut and it wasn't worth grabbing the rodent.
In soviet linux the keyboard is the mouse:
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/movecursor.html
Here you have keyboard commands that millions of people have memorized
certainly not millions.
thousands for sure.
maybe 10s of thousands.
why the hell did they change it?
Because opening the start menu puts you in the search bar. Pressing "U" in the search bar puts a U in the search bar. It can't really be used for a hotkey unless nobody is allowed to search for things that start with 'u'.
And for what its worth, putting search in the start bar was a GOOD thing. I rarely ever have to go digging through the start menu hierarchy any more.
Search is better than the run dialog as well because it works for documents, as well.
So why they hell did they change it? Because they made it better, and millions of users (this time actual millions) benefitted.
It's almost as if Microsoft doesn't give a damn about their customers
Or maybe its you that doesn't? Because having everyone else have to push an extra key to get the search box just so people like you could still press U instead of right-arrow would be asinine.
If you are using Firefox, try the Pentadactyl nightly or Vimperator.
I liked the Amiga's solution: Holding down one of the Amiga keyboard buttons turned the cursor keys into a virtual mouse.
In Linux you can press SHIFT + NUMLOCK.
This toggles numpad-keys-as-virtual-mouse behaviour.
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A WM isn't the whole story. You could end up still fighting the GUI toolkit all the way down if the application isn't built with foresight. Even something as simple as bad tab order between fields.
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I did this from time to time (lets just say in the lab i find it enough if every oscilloscope or auxiliary control computer has a keyboard flying around without a mandatory mouse.
The gnome desktop was hard to navigate, Windows for sure possible and more consistent across applications.
It's also possible to use a computer soully with a refreshable braille display device, though it gets aggrivating, and there's no way in hell I'd do it for a week.
On the Linux side of things, the accessibility is far worse than in Windows, but Gnome provides a lot of the same types of keyboard navigation mechanisms as Windows (Orca doesn't work on KDE, sadly).
Who still wants a keyboard with a numpad?
Every scientist, engineer, businessperson, or individual who thinks quantitatively and likes to do math in real life.
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