Bug#431634: RFP: keynav -- a tool to quickly move the screen pointer with the keyboard

[Miernik <public@public.miernik.name>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

* Package name    : keynav
  Version         : 20070629
  Upstream Author : Jordan Sissel <jls@semicomplete.com>
* URL             : http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/projects/keynav/main.html
* License         : BSD style
  Programming Lang: C
  Description     : a tool to quickly move the screen pointer with the keyboard

Let me just quote a bit from the homepage:

What is keynav?

Another episode in the revolution against mouse-requisite interfaces.
It's one more step towards impulse-driven computing.

Enough marketing jargon. keynav is a piece of an on-going experiment to
make pointer-driven interfaces easier and faster for users to operate.
It lets you move the pointer quickly to most points on the screen with
only a few key strokes.

Note that I said pointer, not mouse. The mouse simply drives the
pointer. We can drive the pointer with other devices too. keynav turns
your keyboard into an fast pointer mover.

What does it do?

You select a piece of the screen. The screen is initially wholely
selected. One move will cut that region by half. A move is a direction:
up, down, left, and right.

Once you're done moving, you simply indicate (with a key stroke) that
you want to move. Boom, cursor moves.

Why it is fast?

keynav is geared towards selecting a piece of the screen very quickly.

Recall from above that you are selecting a region by cutting the
previous region by half. This gives us logarithmic scaling. High
resolution screens incur about the same number of moves to select an
area as smaller screens do.

For example, to select any pixel on a screen with resolution 1920x1200
it would take 21 moves. 21 moves is horrible. There is a bright side!

How often do you really want to click on a single specific pixel on your
screen using your mouse? Never, right? Well, maybe almost never. Most of
the time you want to:

    * Raise a window and give it focus: 80x80 pixel target (worst: 9 moves)
    * Click on an "OK" button: 60x25 pixels (worst: 11 moves)
    * Click on a text widget to activate it: 80x25 or larger

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.21-2-k7 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash