Keyboard-Centric workflow: was GNOME or KDE?

[Steve Litt]

Joe Neglia via PLUG-discuss said on Wed, 23 Mar 2022 12:27:51 -0700

>Glad to see some love for LXDE.  Been using it for many years now.  It
>is simple and small.  Would be interested in hearing more about your
>"keyboard centric workflow" for LXDE.  I'm using xmodmap to emulate
>the beloved and venerable WordStar keyboard diamond to minimize mouse
>usage, but am curious what you are using.

Hi Joe,

The stuff I say here is applicable to any WM/DE (Window Manager or
Desktop Environment) that allows you to assign hotkeys to both WM/DE
functions and external commands, and LXDE is very definitely in that
set.

The central tool of my keyboard centricity is a program called dmenu
from Suckless Tools. Dmenu takes a list as input, and narrows that list
as you type in letters. Via a shellscript, the list I give it is the
executable files on $PATH. My shellscript invokes dmenu to display
vertically instead of the default horizontally, and tells dmenu to
disregard capitalization in the letters I type and the list items it
rules out as I type more and more letters. If I want to abort the
dmenu operation, I press Escape, dmenu returns non-zero, and my
shellscript does nothing. I've assigned hotkey Shift+Ctrl+semicolon.

I also use hotkeys for other things.


SteveT

Steve Litt 
March 2022 featured book: Making Mental Models: Advanced Edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mmm