Published: 13-09-2016 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article

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I had a request from a friend to figure out how she could use her mouse via the keyboard. Normally you would use Mouse Keys, but she uses a kinesis freestyle2 which has no numpad. By using xbindkeys together with xdotool we can use our own key combination to move the mouse keys.

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Make sure the packages are installed:

apt-get install xdotool xbindkeys

Use your window manager to let xbindkeys start at startup.

Append the following to your ~/.xbindkeysrc file:

# ALT SHIFT # 10 up "xdotool mousemove_relative --sync -- 0 -10" Mod1+Shift+w # ALT SHIFT S # 10 down "xdotool mousemove_relative --sync -- 0 10" Mod1+Shift+s # ALT SHIFT A # 10 left "xdotool mousemove_relative --sync -- -10 0" Mod1+Shift+a # ALT SHIFT D # 10 right "xdotool mousemove_relative --sync -- 10 0" Mod1+Shift+d # ALT SHIFT Q # left click "sleep 1 && xdotool click 1" Mod1+Shift+q # ALT SHIFT E # right click "sleep 1 && xdotool click 3" Mod1+Shift+e

This will let you use the WASD combined with ALT and SHIFT to move the mouse. The Q and E keys can be used to left and right click, but that is with a delay of one second. Otherwise some applications like firefox interpret the SHIFT as an instruction to open a new window which is not what we want in this use case.

Tags: accessibility