Best of the Newsgroups: Using X without a mouse

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From: Bela Lubkin <belal@sco.com>
Subject: Re: Running X without a mouse
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 11:00:22 GMT
Message-ID: <20040424110022.GG11653@sco.com> 
References: <20040422130156.A15861@egps.egps.com> <20040422215207.GF11653@sco.com> <20040422225417.A2006@egps.egps.com> <20040423110456.A8118@egps.egps.com> 

Nachman Yaakov Ziskind wrote:

> Folowing up: adding a mouse (either hi-res or low-res) prevented X from
> starting:
> 
> Open Event Driver Failed.
> 
> Fatal Server Error:
> Check Mouse Configuration
> 
> giving up.
> ...
> 
> Removing the mouse let X start again.

Hmmm, my mistake.  I guess I've never tried to run X with _no_ mouse
configured, only with one configured-but-absent.

> But back to my original question: how do I use the X session without a mouse?
> I mean, the menus indicate hot keys (_File _Edit _Options _Tools); there 
> *must* be a way. 
> 
> Right?

You'd think.  I've never been able to figure it out.  There ought to be
a true "keyboard mouse" event driver, allowing you to generate "mouse
events" with keyboard sequences, but there isn't.  And you ought to be
able to invoke the menu hotkeys somehow, but I've never gotten that to
work.

At a guess, it's looking for a modifier key that isn't bound to any of
the usual keyboard keys.  X has this complex input path where normal
modifiers (like "Shift") are translated back and forth to things like
"Modifier3".  If the secret sauce is "Modifier5 + F" to bring up the
"File" menu, and nothing on the keyboard is bound to Modifier5, that's
that...  You might look into xmodmap(X) and its "see also"s, see if you
can chase anything down.

You could get the mouse working by rebooting; but you said you didn't
want to do that.  What about coming in over X from another system (with
a working mouse)?  Should be as simple as:

  displaybox$ xhost +upsbox
  upsbox$     DISPLAY=displaybox:0 xpowerchute &

>Bela<

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