Thursday, August 13, 2009

Stupid X Tricks

Buried in this Penguin Pete Post and Comments is a trick that I'd never seen before. It could be extremely helpful, albeit tedious to use, if your mouse suddenly scurries off or is otherwise inoperable, and it works in any setup running X:

  • Do a 3-figured salute using Ctrl-Alt-Numlock, (in Gnome and KDE, it's Ctrl-Shift-Numlock)
  • Press one of the arrow keys on the keypad
  • The mouse cursor will move on the screen. A bit of experimenting shows that the "5" key is button 1, and 1-3-7-9 move the cursor diagonally. (OK, I looked here. But the diagram is almost unreadable, and I probably would have hit on it eventually.)
  • Unplug mouse, free up USB port. (Well, maybe not.)
  • Apparently you can also do this with that Microsoft product, though not in the same way.
  • Apple? Don't know.

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