Mousewheel to mouskeys

The intent of this forum is to discuss my DOS TSR programs (available at http://bretjohnson.us), how they work and don't work, new/missing features, status of updates, and anything else related to them that may need to be discussed.

Mousewheel to mouskeys

Postby Ninho » Sun Jul 03, 2016 4:46 am

Hi Bret ! I've just discovered Mouskeys - actually I had known about your program but never used it before. It works like a charm for adding a lot of mouse control to programs such as DosLynx - which motivated me to finally download your nice program, and thank you very much!

Now may I take the liberty to suggest adding an important addition which would integrate perfectly with what you already have assembled here : mousewheel to keys. As you certainly know, the Ctmouse open source mouse driver manages wheel movements and can be set to 'call back' Mouskeys (or any program) upon wheel events by an extension of the old MS mouse API (docs come with the downloads of Ctmouse). Am I not right thinking that you have all the needed resources already in Mouskeys to map wheel rotations to simulated key presses ?

My suggestion is to simply map elementary wheel rotations to the down- (resp. up-) arrow key. Other options might include generating the Pgup/PgDn keys instead, or in conjunction with a pressed button or keyboard modifier key - though I think Up/Dn arrows are all a man needs to be happy in this adventure.

I realize you quite possibly have had similar enhancement ideas by yourself or already requested by others and apologize for such a trivial suggestion, anyway, please do note that someone here would *love* to scroll using the wheel, in Doslynx and other DOS programs as well !

Please let us know what you think of the suggestion and whether, time allowing, you would be working at expanding Mouskeys with the proposed function.
Ninho
 
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Re: Mousewheel to mouskeys

Postby Bret » Tue Jul 05, 2016 6:14 am

Thanks for the interest in MOUSKEYS.

Amazingly enough, nobody else has brought this up. That actually surprises me, since using the mouse wheel for scrolling is very useful. I have indeed thought about doing it. Just as an FYI, I've also thought that CTMOUSE should actually add support for a second wheel and some additional buttons, both of which are somewhat common on modern (USB) mice and are supportable with the existing PS2 mouse protocol. And, MOUSKEYS should be able to support the extra wheels and buttons also when and if CTMOUSE does it.

Anyway, there is a problem in that I've lost the source code for MOUSKEYS. Through a series of hardware-related failures and corruptions I don't have the code any more. When I get around to updating it, I'll need to start from scratch and possibly do some reverse-engineering on my old executable versions. It's on my list of things to eventually do, but will unfortunately not happen anytime soon. I've got too many other irons in the fire right now.
Bret
 
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Re: Mousewheel to mouskeys

Postby Ninho » Tue Jul 05, 2016 10:44 pm

Bret wrote: Anyway, there is a problem in that I've lost the source code for MOUSKEYS. Through a series of hardware-related failures and corruptions I don't have the code any more.

Oh ! Sorry to hear this ! So you in effect will have to "hack" your own code !
Have you lost just the source for Mouskeys, or other programs also ? I would hope you still have most of the "bricks" from which your original programmes were assembled, yes ?

In any case this should remind all of us of the necessity of off site, possibly in the cloud, backups. Have you thought about hosting future developments on a common platform, such as git ? Even for code that you do not intend to share the source, just make the repository protected/secret/read only, according to what suits you best.

It's on my list of things to eventually do, but will unfortunately not happen anytime soon. I've got too many other irons in the fire right now.

Ah! Well, well... Best wishes and success in your other endeavours, then...
Ninho
 
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Re: Mousewheel to mouskeys

Postby Bret » Wed Jul 06, 2016 4:33 am

The only one I've actually lost the source code for is MOUSKEYS. I have the other ones. It actually turns out that I'm writing programs in a very different way now. A lot of the old source code would need to be drastically modified anyway, so it's not as big of a deal as it seems. But, there are some things I will want to reverse-engineer so I don't need to do everything from scratch.

I actually had the source code backed up for MOUSKEYS, but even the backup got corrupted. Back then, cloud-based backups didn't even exist. I really don't like cloud-based repositories, either, unless it's a collaborative project. Access to the cloud isn't as ubiquitous as many would like to think, and dependency on the cloud can actually be burdensome instead of freeing. Nobody seems able or willing to collaborate much these days, so progress is quite slow.
Bret
 
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Re: Mousewheel to mouskeys

Postby Ninho » Mon Jul 11, 2016 2:25 am

Well... ISTM there is an easy enough way out of the deadlock while not requiring to rework the existing Mouskeys, at all : that would take the form of a secondary Wheelkeys TSR (to be launched after Mouskeys). Wheelkeys hooks the software mouse API and installs a new call back for the mouse user interrupt routine (cf. int 33/0C). The new routine will process Cutemouse's wheel events ONLY, translating them to grey up/down arrow keypresses (not configurable), and pass other events to the previous call back function (in Mousekeys). Wheelkeys would have to host its own version of the key stuffing code, which of course in a sense is inelegant as making double duty with the respective code in Mouskeys (unless you can reverse engineer the latter enough that you could call its internal routine from the new Wheelkeys) - but hey! who cares for a few dozen duplicated bytes of code? At least as a temporary band aid until you are in position to proudly present a fully revamped Mouskeys to the World :=)
Ninho
 
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Re: Mousewheel to mouskeys

Postby Ninho » Sun Jul 31, 2016 6:11 am

Ninho wrote:Well... ISTM there is an easy enough way out ... that would take the form of a secondary Wheelkeys TSR (to be launched after Mouskeys).


So... All considered, I dood it :=) Wrote a tiny "WheelK" demo which can be used either standalone
or to complement MousKeys (in which case it passes non-wheel mouse events back
for Mouskeys to process).

In no way a challenge or competition to Mouskeys, I would hope, on the contrary
it to be a useful addition to Bret's excellent programme.

I'll be opening a fresh thread to announce and discuss WheelK if you don't mind.
Ninho
 
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