No Mouse, Only Keyboard!

Curious if anyone here is purely using keyboard to operate everything n anything on the Mac OS this way...

As if Terminal style all the way...

Using only the mouse (or only the keyboard) would be quite a challenge on the Mac.

I would say I use the mouse more than people would expect. I like using the Status Menu and Macro Palettes, and frequently get people asking for ways to do things in Keyboard Maestro without using the mouse which surprise me.

As far as I know it's quite impossible to never use the mouse on a Mac, but there are such things as Homerow:

And others:

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Do you want to do everything with the keyboard because you think it will save you time?

In my opinion, what takes the most time is when your eyes are constantly moving back and forth between the keyboard and the screen.

To avoid this, I do the following

  • Shortcuts with ⌘ + letter I can trigger blindly. With ⌥ or ⌃ I can't. So I avoid them. Multipress macros with ⌘ can also be very useful.

  • Used correctly, typed string triggers can also be very useful.

  • Macros of KM palettes can be triggered with the keyboard. Palettes also provide a cheat sheet

I tried hard but I never found a way to discard the mouse altogether, I often wondered if it was even possible in principle. I don't think it is now?

Have people tried using Homerow in the context of KM? I am thinking of a recent situation where I had to create a Marco that within it require repeatedly clicking on a Next button while using Safari. That Next button appeared in varying locations on the screen and in this circumstance it had no Keyboard shortcut. I ended up using the visual recognition tool in KM which ultimately was successful, but when I use this tool I am always a little concerned that it will not be entirely reliable in "finding" something like the Next button.

I wonder whether Homerow might have a role. It would have to consistently use the same keyboard shortcut for this element (Next button) to make it workable in a KM macro. I am not sure what the likelihood of that would be since I do not know the inner workings of this app.

I don't know Homerow. But I do know "shortcat", a (free) app that probably works very similarly. Some time ago I tried to integrate it into KM macros. It worked quite well. However, I don't really need it, which is why I didn't pursue it any further.

If I remember correctly, some strings change dynamically, others do not.