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Have you ever wanted to use the mouse to move something with pixel perfect precision? There is a way to do it: a “keyboard mouse.” One good one comes with Windows, called MouseKeys. If you’re using a desktop computer with a dedicated numeric keypad, you can turn on MouseKeys and leave it on, then use the numeric pad to move the mouse in any direction one pixel at a time.

Unfortunately, MouseKeys is barely usable on a notebook computer. You can get it to work, but you’ll have to turn it on and off all the time because it prevents normal use of the keyboard—the “numeric pad” on my ThinkPads and on most other notebooks is overlaid on the QWERTY keyboard.

So I wrote JKLmouse, the automatic keyboard mouse for notebook and laptop computers. JKLmouse doesn’t use any special modes—it is always active—and it doesn’t interfere with normal use of the keyboard.

The secret is simple: JKLmouse turns keyboard keys into mouse movement keys only while a mouse button is held down. When no mouse button is down, the keyboard works normally. When any mouse button is down, you can use the cursor arrow keys to move the mouse, and you can also use keys on and around the home row: JKL for the right hand or SDF for the left, along with the keys above and below those.

This works especially well on a ThinkPad, where the TrackPoint is also right next to the home row. You can start moving something with the TrackPoint, then continue to hold the mouse button down and use JKL and nearby keys to move the last few pixels, one pixel at a time. There’s no special “keyboard mouse” mode—you can combine TrackPoint and keyboard movement seamlessly. It also works fine with touchpads—just keep the mouse button down and you can use either the touchpad or the JKLmouse keys.

What if you want to use JKLmouse without holding a mouse key down? Hold down the Caps Lock key and you can use all of the JKLmouse keys while Caps Lock is held down. This won’t turn on the Caps Lock mode and doesn’t interfere with normal use of Caps Lock.

I wrote JKLmouse for my own use because I wanted a keyboard mouse that Just Works on my ThinkPad, without the special modes that other keyboard mice use. I’ve found it tremendously useful and I hope you enjoy it too.

JKLmouse runs on Windows 95, 98, 98SE, Me, 2000, and XP. I haven’t tested it on Windows Vista yet. See the download page for more details:

www.jklmouse.com

Enjoy!