DSL Tips and Tricks :: mousless OS

Hi all,

i´ve got an idea and just wanted to have some feedback on that topic. I´d like to have an Operating System, where everything can be done without the need of a mouse. I prefer to do things with keystrokes rather than using a mouse (yes, even in an graphical enviornment). well, for nearly every task you can perform there are applications for the console available. But the one thing i miss, is a pdf viewer. AFAIK there is no way to view pdf files on the console. The mydsl-panel lacks IMO the keyboard support as well. You can select the group of software via keystroke, but if you want to select a specific application within the next opened box you are lost.

Is anyone interessted in something like this?
Feedback would be nice.

Greetz
Escay

Edit: just seen that i missed the right forum... should be in "ideas & suggestions" instead. please move that article. thx.

i'm not interested myself, but wm's that are controlled without a mouse do exist. take a look at the repository, there is one in there i think called evil wm. then again you can just use the console by running DSL 2.

torp

Fluxbox has a very good keygrabber, in my opinion. It can be configured to do practically all of its tasks with the keyboard, and it can be done fairly easily. Ratpoison is made specifically for keyboarders, and was built to resemble Screen. There will soon also be wmii in the repository, which is another keyboard-driven window manager.
Evilwm is not so great as far as keyboarding goes. The program itself is well-controlled through keys, but there is no keybinding available, so applications must be started from a terminal unless you use an additional keygrabber program. This is not very efficient when compared to Fluxbox's ability to assign hotkeys to launch any number of commands.

My personal opinion is that all applications in an ideal world should have the ability to be controlled with a keyboard, regardless of whether or not you have a perfectly useable mouse. Some tasks are better suited to a mouse, such as drawing or shooting monsters, but most can be done at least as efficently with a keyboard.

You can view some pdf files in console indirectly by running them through pdftotext and piping the output to a pager or text editor, although this doesn't work on files that have been locked or do not contain plain text. It definitely is not the same as using a pdf viewer.

Hi,

first of all, thank you for the feedback. I didn´t really thought, that anyone would reply. Anyway...

Mikshaw wrote:
"My personal opinion is that all applications in an ideal world should have the ability to be controlled with a keyboard, regardless of whether or not you have a perfectly useable mouse. "

And that is exactly what i think. You should be able to control your whole software set with a keyboard only. See, that is one more reason, why i like linux. you can do everything you want when you are able to read and willing to learn. (i am both - but unfortunatly the day only has 24 hours)

I had a guess that there is a way of converting the files to view them on a console before. Now i took a closer look to xpdf, which also offers a keyset to use. Nice thing... just what i was looking for.

I´ve tried several WM´s but never found one, which was really comfortable with a keyboard only. Ok, so i will give fluxbox a try.

Would be really nice to use XMMS and DMIX with keyboards only - i´ll look around to find some information on this topic.

kind regards

Escay
(BTW - if there is something wrong with my writing, i am sorry about that. I have not written english since i left school) ;-P

You can control much of xmms through either its own keybindings, or by setting up keybinds in your window manager.
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/xmms.1.html

With a window manager or other keygrabber, you'd need to set up the keybindings using the xmms command followed by a command parameter. There aren't as many controls available this way, but it allows you to control some parts of xmms while you're focused on another application.

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