X-windows and mouse navigation alternatives

[dakong27]

I'm suffering from carpal tunnel from using the mouse. I love the CLI for some things, but it just doesn't do the trick for certain sites that I need to use on the web. Is there some kind of app that I can add onto X that will allow me to use the arrow keys or keypad to move the mouse pointer instead?

Much thanks,

dakong

[jeremy1701]

This is the closest I could find (KDE has a whole section of accessibilty support):

http://accessibility.kde.org/media/accesskeys.php
http://accessibility.kde.org/

Hope that helps!
Jeremy

[xylex_blaiste]

hehehe.. . how in the world did you get carpal tunnel from using the mouse dude! this is the first i've heard.. .lolZ

[dakong27]

thanks for the tip. i do use those keys for mozilla.

i was wondering, though, if anyone had done something like map the x-y axis employed by a mouse to the keypad, so that you could simply use those keys instead throughout X, not just the browser. i've been googling, but often even mighty google can't help you if you can't hit upon the right catchphrase.

there are always the individual hotkeys for a given program, which are fine, i guess, but just thought that perhaps something like what i'm thinking of has already been done.

thanks,

dakong

[dakong27]

The answer is to enable mousekeys in X. I used a nice little CLI utility written by Stephen Montgomery-Smith called xkbset to do it. Once you've installed it, you press 'left SHIFT + left ALT + NumLock" to turn your keypad into a mouse pointer. (Note: in addition to cutting down on carpal, this also helps when your GF swipes your fancy mouse for her laptop

Also, because I'm a bit of a man page bonehead, I had to ask Stephen for help with the syntax to adjust the mousekeys sensitivity. I reproduce his answer here in case anyone else has the same problem:

You want to do something like

xkbset ma 160 40 30 30 500

where the five numbers are
mk-delay
mk-interval
mk-time-to-max
mk-max-speed
mk-curve

To see your current values, type

xkbdet w