Joseph Javier Perla

Blog redesign now enabled. Looks cleaner, fresher. Plus, it has more stuff to do in the sidebar!

Here’s what the site looks like as of today:

I want to avoid RSI.  So, I want to use the mouse as little as I possibly can while I focus on my keyboard.  Unfortunately, alt+tabbing between windows takes far too long and annoys me with how much I have to think to move between the windows.

I often have several windows open.  I want to switch between them very quickly.  So, I created a program using Python and Xlib that generates another program.

The program moves my mouse automatically to a specific location and then clicks automatically.

The program also creates a keyboard shortcut in Gnome.  So, I can type something like Alt+q which calls the program above, moves the mouse to a specific location, and then clicks.

Finally, the program also generates a program which, when called, opens up many windows at specific locations in a grid:

If I combine all of these programs, I can focus between windows very easily. I can move the mouse between 12 spots in a 4×3 grid using the keyboard letters Q,W,E,R, etc like below:

To move to the Top-Left window, I hit Alt+q, which moves my mouse to the top left and clicks, focusing the top-left window.  To move to the bottom right, I press Alt+v, then the mouse moves to the bottom right and clicks, focusing into the bottom right window.

Basically, when I’m programming, I never have to move to my mouse to switch between windows very quickly.  I can open up 12 files at once, and switch between them swiftly and deftly.  When you work on a large application, this becomes very useful.

I’ve open-sourced the program here: http://github.com/jperla/mouse-focus-shortcuts/tree/master .

>Oh well. 1998 me is still pleased to hear this.

Is 1998 you still on the line? Warn him that Star Trek: Insurrection really sucks!

• Re:As a former Digital UNIX admin… (Score:5, Funny)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 23, @04:37PM (#23908891)

  That’s all you’d tell your 1998 self?!?? I’d tell mine to invest heavily in the DotComs so he’d lose all his money…it’d be hilarious like that time someone told me they were my future self and that I should invest heavily in DotCom start-ups and I lost all my money!

I have been saying for a long time that AT&T, Verizon, and others operate in a market with little real competition which allows them to charge ridiculous rates and have unfathomably bad customer service.  Finally, one senator begins investigations into their text messaging pricing practices which have increased by laughable amounts: http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/10/1845210