mouse-free operation for FVWM2?

Cairns, Queensland
2007 December 27

I have been using FVWM2 with Red Hat 9.0 for 10 years as a mouse-free environment. I will not change. Unfortunately, there are routines that I have never solved in all this time. Can anyone help with the following problems:

o There are little buttons in the upper left and upper right of every X-term display. Is there any way to configure FVWM2 so that one can “click” them directly using the keyboard (mouse free!)?

o Is there any way to configure FVWM2 so that the left and right mouse buttons can be “clicked” by using a key stroke on the key board rather than a mouse?

o Is there any danger that FVWM2 will not be usable on future versions of LINUX, say like SuSE?

Thanks for any help offered.

Michael Snowden

Not as such – the best way of doing that would be for you to bind the same mouse actions to keys on that window as in:

Key a whatever Pick somefunctionname

See the: FakeClick command.

When the moon’s waining. :neutral_face: Stupid question…

– Thomas Adam

Cairns, Queensland
2007 December 27

Mr. Adam:

Yes, my questions are stupid, but your answers are not! I would very much appreciate your expanding a bit on how I can access the X-term buttons from the keyboard by using a code. I don’t quite follow what you mean, but I suspect that you have a solution to a huge problem I’ve had all these years. Can you spell it out for me, please?

If so many mega-thanks.

Michael Snowden

Call me Thomas. There’s also no real need for you to state your location and date, since the date is certainly picked up by PhpBB.

Well, you wouldn’t need to actually simulate the clicking, just rather call the actions directly. So for example, assume you had button 1 on some window defined to load a menu. It might look like this:

Mouse 1 1 N Menu someMenu

If all you wanted to do is to simulate opening the menu ‘someMenu’ via a key-binding, then you could use:

Key A M WSF Menu someMenu

For instance. And so on, and so forth…

– Thomas Adam

Cairns, Queensland
2007 December 30

Really interesting that one can configure fvwm2.rc to programme individual commands rather than having to click on the buttons themselves. That’s getting super close to what I’m trying to do. Once I can understand how to apply that code syntax, which you have described, in the .rc file, I’ll be away and flying.

However, there is still one problem that that routine may not solve. I am using a combination of fvwm2, Red Hat 9.0, and Netscape 7.0. Okay? So would there be a code for the fvwm2.rc file that will allow one to access the back and forward buttons in Netscape from the keyboard. Netscape itself allows alt key operations for the various drop-down menus, but not for back, forward, reload, and stop.

Were that possible, one could use Netscape totally mouse free and play the Internet entirely from the keyboard as though it were a Mozart Piano Concerto!

I cannot believe there is a pianist alive who will touch a mouse!

Cheers,

Michael

This has nothing to do with the window manager at all now, but you would almost certainly have to send events to the application (netscape) to get it to react as though you were using the keyboard to navigate around it – for that, you will need a program called ‘xse’.

– Thomas Adam