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One Week: No Mouse, Just Keyboard

Posted by timothy on from the trackball-also-off-the-table dept.

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."

3 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Windows? by White+Flame · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Windows? by Volanin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
    If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
  3. As a blind Windows/Linux user... by GarrettK18 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Yes, it is completely possible to do so. There are even built-in shortcuts to do just about everything (desktop, start menu, application navigation mechanisms, ETC)... and that's not even getting into all the stuff a screen reader gives you, like the ability to inspect the screen with a "flat review cursor." Then there are all sorts of fun things like "spell word", ETC.

    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).