Look ma, no mouse: tips and tricks

Repeatedly reaching for your mouse slows you down in the short term, and in the long term brings on health problems (RSI). To stay fast and healthy, keep your hands on your keyboard. To keep your hands there, this series, “Look ma, no mouse!” will guide you through easy to use tools to use your keyboard to control your computer instead of your mouse.

In this piece, we’ll look at a few tips and tricks to do so.

Mouse clicks from the keyboard

Even with i3 and vimium, sometimes the browser is out of focus and needs a simple mouse click (especially if we use Ctrl+L). To do this with they keyboard, we’ll bust out xte, an easy to use keyboard and mouse input simulator. It can do a lot more than click, but clicking is what we’re after.

Install:

sudo apt install -y xautomation

Use in the terminal:

echo mouseclick 1 | xte

Integrate left, middle, and right click into i3 by adding the following to i3’s config:

bindsym $mod+Shift+A exec "echo mouseclick 1 | xte"
bindsym $mod+Shift+S exec "echo mousecli…