Announcement : WheelK - a complement for 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.

Announcement : WheelK - a complement for MousKeys

Postby Ninho » Sun Jul 31, 2016 7:33 am

@All ! First thing, will you excuse the bad English, please !
Considering Bret's stated lack of time to currently update his (excellent) Mouskeys, I've written (free to use) WheelK which converts mouse wheel 'ticks' into keypresses of the (grey) up and down arrow keys, in a similar spirit that Mouskeys translates other mouse events : movements and button presses.

It is further described, and downloadable, from http://ninho.users.micso.fr/wheelk

Source code is not included, mainly because I might still consider adding/changing some features; interested developers may request it by email. The useful resident part anyway, viz. WheelK's "mouse callback procedure", is only 32 bytes long! the rest is relatively tedious loader, unloader, option processing etc, code.

This in no way is attempting to challenge or compete with Mouskeys ! On the contrary, recognizing how useful Mouskeys has been and still is, it aims to be a small complement, and designed to work with it from the start.

WheelK can be used either standalone - processing only wheel ticks -
or, if loaded after Mouskeys, it'll process the wheel itself & pass all other mouse events for Mouskeys to translate as usual !

WheelK is extremely tiny - the resident size is under 100 BYTES ( actually could be reduced to 32 bytes using a better loading scheme, as demonstrated in my open source French keyboard driver). Of course WheelK can be loaded, (re)enabled, disabled or even unloaded if necessary, at the command line or in a .BAT file.

WheelK requires at least a 80286 processor and AT-compatible BIOS.

I have dubbed it "demo" not because of any brokenness that l know of, but because I have strived to avoid "feature creep". As a consequence, it does very little indeed, yet il'll bring wheel support to many DOS programs : for instance, test it with such varied progs as Buerg's list, DOSLynx, or at the 4DOS command line (or MS command.com+ DOSKeys)...

Please refer to the web page and the Readme file included in the download for details.

I expect some users of MousKeys and readers of this forum will find my little wheel "driver" a useful complement to their arsenal, and I hope to hear back from users. Also will I answer questions inasmuch as Bret will tolerate my (ab)using his Forum to that end.

Depending on feed-back, I may add some (limited) features/modify the way it works. I wish to avoid bloat and feature creep though.

Maybe? add native button press fixed conversion (Enter/Escape) when WheelK is used standalone (without Mouskeys ).
Key event generation "by hardware" 'similar to Mouskeys /K) ? probably off limits for this demo, although I have the experience & all the pieces to add it if it's REALLY REALLY wanted.

But then I'd rather have Bret rewrite Mouskeys+plus+Wheel !
Ninho
 
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