A utility for X11 that moves the mouse cursor using the keyboard. Written in Haskell.

This utility lets you quickly move the mouse cursor to one of 9 common spots on the screen. It is intended to reduce mouse usage, but not to replace the mouse completely. It does not provide precise aiming; it only provides approximate positioning.

Bind a hotkey in your WM configuration, or by using xbindkeys, to run place-cursor-at — for example, Super+M. When you press the hotkey, 9 windows appear on the current screen, each showing a letter. Press the corresponding letter on your keyboard, and the mouse cursor will move to the center of that window; the application then exits. This lets you quickly move the mouse cursor to one of 9 different spots with a two-step key combo.

Other key bindings:

1. Press Escape to close the application when one of the letter windows is focused.

2. Move focus to the letter window where you want the mouse cursor to be, then press Enter. This is the same as pressing that window’s letter on your keyboard.

I originally created this tool for myself, to use with xmonad and i3.

Requirements

Either one:

1. Nix Package Manager

2. The Haskell Tool Stack and:

   1. libX11 development files
   2. libXinerama development files

How to use

With Nix

See Nix Package Manager.

It is available in nixpkgs, so you can just run it right away:

nix-shell -p place-cursor-at --run place-cursor-at

Or:

nix run nixpkgs#place-cursor-at

NixOS

You can add this application to your NixOS configuration.nix:

{ pkgs, ... }:
{
  environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.place-cursor-at ];
}

Or pick any Git commit (e.g. latest version from the master branch) and build it from sources:

{ pkgs, lib, ... }:
let
  place-cursor-at-src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "unclechu";
    repo = "place-cursor-at";
    # Git commit hash.
    rev = "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff";
    # Will be calculated and shown the build failure log.
    # Just put that value from the log here.
    hash = lib.fakeHash;
  };

  place-cursor-at = pkgs.callPackage place-cursor-at-src {};
in
{
  environment.systemPackages = [ place-cursor-at ];
}

With Stack

See The Haskell Tool Stack.

stack build
stack exec place-cursor-at

You can install place-cursor-at binary to ~/.local/bin directory (make sure you have this directory in your PATH environment variable):

stack install

Running it as script

Assuming that you have the GHC with all the required dependencies available in your PATH (e.g. by entering nix-shell) you can just run it like this:

runhaskell src/place-cursor-at.hs

But it starts faster and works more responsive when you pre-compile it. Though running it as a script is still pretty usable.

You can also try to run it as a nix-shell script (it has nix-shell shebang with a nixpkgs pin, so it’s reproducible) as a proof-of-concept. But it takes a bit of time to start. Not for every day use:

src/place-cursor-at.hs

Usage info

TODO: Put generated usage info here from the place-cursor-at help call.

Development/contribution notes

Using Stack on NixOS

If you need to work with Stack on NixOS you would have to use --system-ghc in order to make it work. You can manually add --system-ghc to each call of stack or define this alias for your convenience:

alias stack='stack --system-ghc'

Author

Viacheslav Lotsmanov

Contributors

The logo is created by psikoz and some technical adjustments are made by Viacheslav Lotsmanov.

Licenses

1. place-cursor-at — GNU/GPLv3

2. The logo — Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

   These files in artwork/logo directory in particular:

   • artwork/logo/horizontal.svg
   • artwork/logo/horizontal.png
   • artwork/logo/vertical.svg
   • artwork/logo/vertical.png
   • artwork/logo/icon.svg
   • artwork/logo/icon.png