Going Mouseless, Or Using The Computer Without a Physical Mouse

I’ve gone mouseless, or using the computer without a physical mouse, for around 2 months. The supporting tools I used are:

• Vimium: a browser extension for interaction (mainly navigation/links following) while browsing the web
• warpd: a program to control the mouse in other cases
• A drawing tablet: the last resort if warpd cannot make it

To be honest, I don’t think there is a huge boost in productivity, but it helps with concentration as I don’t have to move my hands that often anymore. Going mouseless might aid in preventing common pains and injuries of software engineers (namely RSI and carpel tunnel) as well. In this post, I’ll try to get into each tool I used and my thoughts about them.

Vimium

As a software engineer, I spend a lot of time in the browser to skim library/language documents. At a certain point, scrolling up and down and jumping between links using the mouse felt like a chore, so I wanted a tool to help with that. One additional point is that I’m familiar with Vim and its key binding (I’m drafting and editing this post on Neovim), so Vimium ¹ comes as a natural aid.

Here is a demo of how I use Vimium to scroll up and down in my blog post list:

Another useful feature of Vimium that you might use daily is to:

• Press f to highlight clickable links with labels, and then
• Press the keys written on the labels to finally select the one you want

Here is a demo of the feature, where I slowed down a lot to make sure that it’s not too confusing:

Vimium is a browser plugin and sometimes, you hit the limit of what it can do. One sticking example that I can think of is that:

• Vimium allows us to use Ctrl + [label keys] to open a link in a new tab
• If [label keys] ends with w, then the key combination becomes Ctrl + w, which is overridden by a browser to close the current tab instead, which is really undesirable

Overall, I think Vimium fits my needs and I don’t plan to find a replacement any time soon. There are alternatives like Qutebrowser ², and Nyxt ³ which in theory is more powerful, but I did not find the time to try them.

warpd

Vimium served 80% of my browsing scenarios. For the 20% left and when I have to leave the browser, I reached out to warpd ⁴, which touts itself as

a modal keyboard-driven virtual pointer

Let’s go with a demo, where I try to move my cursor (which currently is a red dot) and click on a link:

(I turned screenkey ⁵ on to better show how I used the keyboard to control the cursor, but it didn’t work and only able to capture the first Window + Alt + c, which is the combination to start warpd; additionally, having the red dot overlap the normal cursor seems like a bug)

Despite being a reliable tool, I must admit that there are some caveats:

• It’s barely updated (the last GitHub commit is 3 years ago)
• It only works in Linux X11. Wayland is partially supported (Sway/wlroots and no Gnome)
• High learning curve: I must admit the original key binding of warpd is not that intuitive (despite being Vim-like, I’m unsure why it uses e and r to scroll up/down). Getting used to the way warpd override other keyboard shortcuts when it’s activated isn’t easy, either (let’s say we are used to being able to Ctrl + c after you select a text with our mouse, but as warpd is taking control of the keyboard, it won’t work)
• Unexpected bugs: sometimes it renders the software unusable (when the cursor’s movable area is totally off from the screen; it can be fixed by restarting warpd’s process), and sometimes it’s highly annoying (the cursor is overlayed by another on-screen element)

There is keynav ⁶, which works on X11 and is not that feature-ful. I’ve heard good words about hints ⁷, but did not try it out as… it’s not available on NixOS ⁸. Finally, for Wayland users, there is wl-kbptr ⁹.

Drawing Tablet

I have had a drawing tablet for around half a year. In the beginning, before I went mouseless, it served well as a tool for diagram sketching. After I went mouseless, it has an additional use: to serve as the ultimate fallback in case warpd cannot make it.

Here is a quick snap of the drawing tablet that I’m using:

It’s a XP-Pen Deco V2, which is quite affordable at around 50 dollars. You can “activate” the tablet pen’s main button by pressing the tip down the screen. There are two additional side buttons which are similar to the smart phone’s volume buttons. My binding for the buttons are:

• The main button: the mouse’s left click
• One side button: the mouse’s middle button for screen moving
• Another side button: the mouse’s right click button

In theory, the drawing tablet could work as a mouse replacement completely. However, in reality, my multiple monitors usage prevents it from being fully workable: I’m using two screens, which mean I can either let the tablet covers the two screens (doesn’t fully utilize the pad’s screen, and may affect the input’s precision as it’s covering an area that is too large), or just let it cover one screen (I have no way to access the other screen).

Here is an illustration to the problem:

This is not a post about drawing tablets, so I won’t dive too deep into which one should you choose in case you are intrigued, but we generally have 3 options ¹⁰ :

• Pen tablet: a pen + a pad for drawing that connects to your computer
• Pen display: a pen + a display screen that can be drawn on that connects to your computer
• Standalone tablet: a separate computer that is able to receive pen input

I would say you should go with a small pen tablet first, as it’s cheap for your expirement (just give it away or even throw it away in case you don’t sketch as much as expected or don’t want to replace your mouse with it).

Conclusion

I hope I showed you my intriguing setup that replaced the physical mouse and allow me to just rest my hand on my keyboard all the time. Sometimes, it feels like a… red herring to a problem: the thinking involved in software development is hard work; no matter how good my setup is, the hard work is still there to be done. Then I balance myself with the thought that the “seemingly” useless effort to avoid being distracted helps me at… concentrating better, and getting into the flow better to solve harder problems, so it isn’t that useless.