Inevitably, you will have the need to be able to navigate your computer without the use of a mouse. So when this situation comes up, you can know what to do by simply reading this article titled “How To Navigate and Use Computer Without [a] Mouse or Touchpad“.

The article gives you a couple of methods which will allow you to control the mouse cursor with your keyboard. While (obviously) much slower than using a mouse, it will get the job done.

Hopefully, this situation doesn’t occur often (if ever) for you, but if it does at least you know what to do.

David Risley, owner of PCMech, does use a trackball mouse on his Mac Pro. When I say trackball I’m not referring to the old-school mice (mouses?) that were around before optical. Rather I’m talking about the above-surface blood red colored plastic balls that look like the HAL 9000’s camera eye.

Every time I use Dave’s computer box I have to deal with that stupid thing.

If you ever wanted a way to keep people from using your computer, use a trackball mouse. It’s a sure-fire way to say that if you’re not willing to "thumb it", you sir (or ma’am), won’t be able to use my computer.

It’s not like trackball mice are plentiful. NewEgg doesn’t have too many to choose from. But this probably makes users of this awful input device very smug, like it’s a secret society of annoying-mouse users or something.

Folks who use trackball mice are nice enough people. It’s just that I strongly disagree with their choice of mouse. It’s big; it’s ugly; it should be banned like asbestos.

One of these days I’m going to bring a scissors to Dave’s place, cut the wire, chuck the mouse in the garbage then blame it on the cat.

The only thing worse than a trackball mouse is a keyboard with blank keys.

Trackball people, I respect you as computer users, but your mouse sucks.

After reading the title of this post, you are probably thinking to yourself: KVM. This tip is not about a KVM, rather a unique open source project called Synergy.

From their about page:

With synergy, all the computers on your desktop form a single virtual screen. You use the mouse and keyboard of only one of the computers while you use all of the monitors on all of the computers. You tell synergy how many screens you have and their positions relative to one another. Synergy then detects when the mouse moves off the edge of a screen and jumps it instantly to the neighboring screen. The keyboard works normally on each screen; input goes to whichever screen has the cursor.

Awesome.

I can see this tool being incredibly useful for PC shops which may have lots of computer running at once. This allows you to use a single mouse and keyboard to control all of them. The only catch is you have to have a monitor for each computer.

Personally I don’t have any use for this tool, but if anyone has ever used it please post your experience with it.

Yesterday the computer mouse – something we all have – officially turned 40. If you want to check out the history of the mouse, Gearlog has got you covered.

But for a PCMech article I’m going to throw in my personal experiences with Ye Olde Computer Mouse. Continued