Recently I installed Linux at work, and I have found very little reason to continue...
Ha-har! You think this is the best thing you can do for your mouse, but you would be wrong. The best thing you can do is to stop using a physical mouse at all. At first I thought it would suck, because not every program is keyboard-shortcut friendly. Then I installed something called AT Mouse, and I’m happily mouse-less.
Allow me to direct you to their help page, which describes its usage. You can move slowly for accuracy, you can move quickly for speed (double-press), you can pop the mouse from one side of the screen to the other (press left/right when at the edge), you can quickly jump across the screen (repeated presses of 7/9/1/3) - all using the numpad on your keyboard. If you’re one of the few people in the world who type so many numbers that you use the numpad, good news: you can still use it when you want! Though it no longer turns on the “Num Lock” light on my keyboard, but if I find the mouse isn’t moving, I just press NumLock+/ and we’re back in business.
In all honesty, it’s responsive enough that I can browse the web with it (though I’ve never tried Firefox’s Caret Browsing, and got too lazy to try out the mouseless Firefox dubbed Conkeror). Enough that I can stop using my laptop’s trackpad, which is the bane of my existence. Check it out, ‘cause it’s free. I’m a bit upset with some of their keybindings of other keys, mainly because it messes with my AutoHotKey scripts. Luckily, there are many alternative options that use AutoHotKey, which provide the benefit of being easily modified to add some of the nice features of AT Mouse.
So, to summarize our options:
- Quick and easy
- One or two of many AutoHotKey versions
- Take one of the AutoHotKey versions and add your own features
I can’t ditch my existing customizations, obviously, so I’m going to cheat and steal take inspiration from AT Mouse to add things to one of the scripts I just linked to. It may take a while, because I have actually important things to do, but I’ll post here when I’ve got something worth using. Toss it up on GitHub or something, make life easy.