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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 , automation , blog , x , xbindkeys , xdotool , xorg