Support/RFC: Use the keypad as single-handed "browsing remote"

[pataquets]

Making a feature request / getting help

• Tridactyl version (:version): 1.23.0
• Firefox version (Top right menu > Help > About Firefox): 120.0

Use the keypad as single-handed "browsing remote"

I was thinking on having a single-handed navigation using just the numeric keypad block. It has some advantages, especially for long browsing sessions:

• The key layout is ortholinear (i.e. key rows are stacked instead of staggered), which might be ease some RSI.
• Numpad is a rightmost on keyboard, so less arm twisting towards the keyboard center.
• There are plenty of add-on keypads, even wireless, which might be of used as a sort of "browsing remote", ideal for 10-foot user interfaces.

As Tridactyl can provide numeric hints, being able to bind commands to keys in the numpad would be perfect. As I start reading the docs, I get to Mozilla's docs on keyboard events. However, binds like Multiply doesn't seem to work (as opposed to *). I'd like to all add,subtract and number keys to be differentiated from main keyboard counterparts, to assign the different functions.

Is that even possible? What would the syntax be?

[bovine3dom]

Hi, we don't support directly binding to key objects, but you can use the keyboardlayout settings to override each keyboardEvent.code from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/UI_Events/Keyboard_event_code_values - which, NB, is not the same as the page you were on - you want to bind to to a character that you are unlikely to type (such as an emoji from https://emoji.muan.co/ )

set keyboardlayoutbase qwerty # whatever your keyboard is
set keyboardlayoutforce true
set keyboardlayoutoverrides.NumpadMultiply ✖️✖️ # second character is for shift+key, make it different if you like. sometimes it will work
bind ✖️ scrollline 10
reload

Code is untested because I don't have any keyboards that have numpads :)

Edit: you need beta 1.23.0-pre6585 or newer to use these settings

[pataquets]

At some point, my addon went updated, so I decided to try it:

:version
1.24.1

As per your instructions, I did:

set keyboardlayoutforce true
set keyboardlayoutoverrides.Numpad5 f

Although it worked, I've found it comes with a major drawback: my keyboard layout changed from Spanish to US 😨, which makes it hardly usable 😢.
Luckily, I've found how to deal with this in keyboardlayoutforce docs (dropping here for reference). I'll get around to it when I have some more time.

[bovine3dom]

Yeah, just follow the instructions https://tridactyl.xyz/build/static/docs/classes/_src_lib_config_.default_config.html#keyboardlayoutbase and I'd be happy to add a Spanish layout