Mouse keys

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Mouse keys is a feature of some Graphical user interfaces that uses the keyboard (esp. numeric keypad) as a pointing device (coll. mouse). Its roots lie in the earliest days of visual editors when line and column navigation was controlled with arrow keys (e.g. hjkl, esdx). Today, Mousekeys, usually refers only to the numeric keypad layout standardized with the introduction of the X Window System in 1984 ^{[1] [2]} .

Contents 1 Layout 2 History 3 MouseKeysAccel 4 Enabling 5 References

[edit] Layout

key	action
8	cursor up
2	cursor down
6	cursor right
4	cursor left
7	cursor up and left
9	cursor up and right
3	cursor down and right
1	cursor down and left
5	click selected button
+	double click selected button
0	depress selected button
.	release selected button
/	select primary button
*	select modifier button
-	select alternate button

Note: MS Windows does not support diagonal movement. The 1, 3, 7, 9 keys remain digits whether or not MouseKeys is enabled.

[edit] History

Historically, MouseKeys supported GUI programs when many terminals had no dedicated pointing device. As pointing devices became ubiquitous, the use of mousekeys narrowed to situations where a pointing device was missing, unusable, or inconvenient. Such situations may arise from

• precision requirements (e.g. technical drawing)
• disabled user,
• environmental limits (e.g. vibration in car or plane)
• broken equipment,

[edit] MouseKeysAccel

The MouseKeysAccel control of the X Window System applies configurable ^[3] cursor acceleration up to a maximum rate after a direction key (1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9) is held more than a minimum time ^[4].

[edit] Enabling

On Windows, the mouse keys feature - MouseKeys - can be enabled on the Mouse tab of Accessibility Options (visible in Classic View of Control Panel). Once enabled, it can be activated by pressing Left Alt + Left Shift + Num Lock ^[5] .

Under the X Window Systems Xorg and XFree86 used on Unix-like systems like Linux you can nominally activate/deactivate MouseKeysAccel by pressing Alt + Shift + Num Lock ^[6]. MouseKeys without acceleration (i.e. plot mode) is sometimes available with Shift + NumLock. This is independent of the Window Manager in use.

[edit] References

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