How to add web content without touching the keyboard.

[HalfCyborg]

Had an idea that worked, so I thought I would share it....

I use a great little utility called "StrokeIt." Yes, I know that sounds obscene, but it isn't. From their website:

What is StrokeIt?
StrokeIt is an advanced mouse gesture recognition engine and command processor. What is a mouse gesture? Mouse gestures are simple symbols that you "draw" on your screen using your mouse. When you perform a mouse gesture that StrokeIt can recognize, it will perform the "action" associated with that gesture. In short, it's a nifty little program that lets you easily control programs by drawing symbols with your mouse.

What can it do?
StrokeIt can currently recognize more than 80 unique mouse gestures and can be easily trained to recognize many more. For each gesture recognized, StrokeIt can execute a user-defined set of commands within the active application. StrokeIt commands are defined within plugin libraries that can be easily created by third parties to do nearly anything.

OK, on to the solution. After you have installed and used StrokeIT enough to understand how to add/configure it, just add a gesture to IE (or whatever browser you use) to send the correct keystrokes. I've changed my Paste command from the default in UR to be Ctrl-Shift-V, so my StrokIt command looks like this:

[ALT_DOWN]D[ALT_UP][CTRL_DOWN]C
[SHIFT_DOWN]V[CTRL_UP][SHIFT_UP]

The above will move the cursor to the address bar (Alt-D), Copy the URL (Ctrl-C), and paste it into UR (Ctrl-Shift-V). Voila!

Now if I am researching a subject, I just set UR to store into the highlighted item. When I get to a page of interest, I just do a "U" gesture and my page is saved.

.....now if I could just figure out how to tell when the save is complete (the message box in UR comes up behind the browser)...

Here is the home page for StrokeIt for interested parties:

http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/

It plays well with about 99% of the apps I own, every once in a while, you will get an app that does NOT like StrokeIT. When this happens, add the app to StrokeIT and check the box that says "disable gestures in this application."

Of course, it is also very useful in UR to add gestures for the keyboard shortcuts you use the most (back, forward, home, search, etc.). If there is interest, I will put up another post with step-by-step instructions.

[MardiM2]

I'm VERY interested in hearing more. I just downloaded StrokeIt, and it looks very useful, but learning some of your tricks will no doubt make it more so. = ) Please?