What is keynav?

Another episode in the revolution against mouse-requisite interfaces. It's one more step towards impulse-driven computing.

Enough marketing jargon. keynav is a piece of an on-going experiment to make pointer-driven interfaces easier and faster for users to operate. It lets you move the pointer quickly to most points on the screen with only a few key strokes.

Note that I said pointer, not mouse. The mouse simply drives the pointer. We can drive the pointer with other devices too. keynav turns your keyboard into an fast pointer mover.

What does it do?

You select a piece of the screen. The screen is initially wholely selected. One move will cut that region by half. A move is a direction: up, down, left, and right.

Once you're done moving, you simply indicate (with a key stroke) that you want to move. Boom, cursor moves.

Why it is fast?

keynav is geared towards selecting a piece of the screen very quickly.

Recall from above that you are selecting a region by cutting the previous region by half. This gives us logarithmic scaling. High resolution screens incur about the same number of moves to select an area as smaller screens do.

For example, to select any pixel on a screen with resolution 1920x1200 it would take 21 moves. 21 moves is horrible. There is a bright side!

How often do you really want to click on a single specific pixel on your screen using your mouse? Never, right? Well, maybe almost never. Most of the time you want to:

• Raise a window and give it focus: 80x80 pixel target (worst: 9 moves)
• Click on an "OK" button: 60x25 pixels (worst: 11 moves)
• Click on a text widget to activate it: 80x25 or larger

Watch the demo!

Bored of reading? How about a screencast demonstration? Click here or the image below. Hopefully the demo gives you a good idea of what keynav does.

Mailing list

The keynav users mailing list is: keynav-users@googlegroups.com

I'll be announcing new versions on this mailing list. Additionally, if you want help or want to contribute patches to keynav, the mailing list is a good place to go.

Supported Platforms

keynav is currently written in C and only works in X11 (Unix graphics environment). I am planning on porting keynav to both Windows and OS X. If you are interested in helping me with this, please contact me! Known working:

• FreeBSD + Xorg 6.9.0
• FreeBSD + Xorg 7.2.0
• Ubuntu Dapper + Xorg 7.0.0
• Ubuntu Feisty + Xorg 7.2.0
• Ubuntu Hardy + Xorg 7.2.0
• Cygwin + Xorg 6.8.x
• Fedora 9

I've seen strong interest in this software working on other platforms, so I'm doing the best I can. Again, if you're a .NET (or just Windows) or OS X coder, and are willing to help port this, let me know. It's only 200 lines of C in Xlib, so it can't be more than a one-day-long project.

Download it!

keynav-20080614.01.tar.gz

Looking for an older version? Try the keynav releases archive

Build instructions

make keynav

The above should be all you need to do.

How to use it

Run keynav, and activate it by pressing Control+Semicolon. You should see a thin frame on the screen with a cross in it.

The following is the default configuration:

• h : select the left half of the region
• j : select the bottom half of the region
• k : select the top half of the region
• l : select the right half of the region
• shift+h : move the region left
• shift+j : move the region down
• shift+k : move the region top
• shift+l : move the region right
• semicolon : Move the mouse to the center of the selected region
• spacebar : Move the mouse and left-click
• escape : Cancel the move

Configuration file

Your config file must live in ~/.keynavrc. Such as /home/jls/.keynavrc

The config file format consists of a keysequence followed by a comma-separated list of commands. For example:

space warp,click 1,end

This would move the mouse, click left mouse button, and finish (close the keynav selector) when you hit spacebar while keynav was active. A sample config file comes with the distribution as 'keynavrc'.

The following is a list of key modifiers: shift, ctrl, alt, or any valid X Keysym, such as Shift_L, etc.

List of commands:

start

Activate keynav

end

Deactivate keynav

cut-left, cut-right, cut-up, and cut-down

Cut half of the selection in a given direction. For example, cut-left will select the left half of keynav selector region. If you attempt to cut the window too small, the operation will abort. Cut can take a percentage value to cut by. The default is ".5"

move-left, move-right, move-up, move-down

Move the selector window a given direction. The movement amount is equal to the width or height of the selector depending on the direction. You cannot move the window outside the bounds of the screen. Move can take percentage value that specifies the distance relative to the size of the window. The default is "1.0"

warp

Move the mouse to the center of the selector

click <button>

Click the given mouse button once. 1 == left, 2 == middle, 3 == right.

doubleclick <button>

Click the mouse button twice, quickly. This can also be achieved by doing "click 1,click 1" in your command sequence.

drag <button> [keyseq]

Toggle dragging mode for the given button. If keyseq is given then that keysequence is held during the initial mouse button down event. This is useful in invocations such as 'drag 1 alt' to do a alt+click-drag on a window to move it.

grid <rows>x<columns> [Added 20080509]

Change the grid layout of the selection. For example, specifying 'grid 3x3' will divde the screen selection into 9 cells, 3 rows and 3 columns. Specifying 'grid 2x3' will divide the screen selection into 6 cells, 2 rows and 3 columns.

cell-select <row>x<column> OR cell-select <cell> [Added 20080509]

Select a specific cell in the grid. The NxM syntax selects the specific row and column. The single number syntax selects the cell numbered counting from the top left to the bottom left. For example, a 3x3 grid would be numbered this way:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9