I don’t know about you, but I find surfing the internet without using a mouse pretty hard, almost unbearably so. Last weekend when my mouse died, for no apparent reason, I was tearing my hair out trying to find a way of moving the mouse cursor with the keyboard. Fortunately, I did find ways to do this. Apart from being a mouse-death contingency plan, some folks argue that using the keyboard to move the mouse cursor is actually better than using the mouse at all. For myself, the mouse somewhat lowers my productivity (keyboard-to-mouse hand movements are ineffficient) and makes ergonomics at my computer desk slightly more complicated. However, the mouse is still the king of the click-and-point world and replacing it completely would be hard.
So what do you do when you want to use the keyboard for a mouse? Fortunately, windows does have a pretty handy way of doing this: using the numeric keypad to move the mouse.
Steps to follow:
1. Go to control panel and select ‘Accessibilty Options’.
2. Select the mouse tab.
3. Check ‘Use Mousekeys’ and click apply.
Turn the numeric keypad on (by pressing Num Lock) and you can move the mouse using keys 1-9, with 5 being the left-click button. The movements are Up, Down, Left, Right, and all diagnols. Pretty neat, huh?
Alternatively, you can try out this niftly little program, or try a keyboard-shortcut based approach.
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