10.1 enables mousefree operation!

brianleahy

brianleahy

Colonel Panic
Examine your System Preferences for Mouse and Keyboard. They provide two interesting keyboard-only operation options:

First (I think under the mouse pane) you can enable your numeric keypad to 'drive' the mouse pointer around the screen at the pixel level (though I haven't yet figured out how to click in that mode.)

Second, under Keyboard settings is a tab that says "Full Keyboard Access". It provides key-combos to let you navigate the menubar, toolbars and dock totally mouse-free.

Not that I'm anti-mouse by any means, but every now and then my Logitech mouse will just stop responding, while my Apple keyboard continues to work. It'll be really nice to have a way to initiate a proper restart via the keyboard.
 
While I'm glad that Apple made any attempt at full keyboard control, the results are less than stellar. The keyboard can be a faster alternative to the mouse in many situations, but X's implementation requires you to use the arrows to linearly traverse over all the menu items until you get to the one you want. I can't ever imagine how this would be useful beyond maybe browsing the menus of a brand new application.

There should be faster ways of selecting items like every other OSs use of underlined mneumonic characters, or even just starting to type the name of the command. Imagine bringing up a menu of countries or state names like is found on many web pages and just being able to start typing you answer and see it get selected as opposed to having to scroll the list yourself. Or in a giant Fonts menu...
 
system preferences -> universal access -> click the mouse tab

here you'll find "mouse keys" off by default but if you click the radio button for on, it will allow you to control the pointer through the right hand side numerical keypad. if you so desire.
 
Thanks for the correction. It is indeed the Universal Access pane that enables mouse keys, and not the Mouse pane.
 
thanks...
Im glad you posted this because I do remember running into that option on my first once over of 10.1 but thought nothing of it. I know geekusj may think it useless but I think it has great potential.

Aiming the mouse while trying to frag someone is q3, while manuevering wiht the other hand are 2 very different motions and can be mentally confused. I think with a little tweaking and some practice using the numeric keys will be a better option for me...

thanks for the insight!
 
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