If you grew up with computers using a GUI interface, the idea of not using a mouse probably seems ridiculous. Why would anyone want to do that? As I’ve said in other contexts, you can live without air conditioning too but why would you? Some, like Rob Pike, have even claimed that using a mouse is faster than using a keyboard.
Emacs users, of course, famously revile the use of a mouse with their editor but likely fall back to using it in other contexts such as a browser. Sometimes, though, the choice is snatched away from you and you’re forced to live without a mouse. That’s what happened to loafofpiecrust when his mouse failed. As he reports over at the Emacs subreddit, he was in the middle of doing his homework when his mouse failed but was able to continue because he was using Emacs, probably using EXWM, and had made arrangements for mouseless browsing in Firefox with tridactyl. He notes that he found not having the mouse made him even faster.
Naturally, I was jealous. First because as a Mac user I don’t have EXWM available but also because I use Safari and don’t have tridactyl available either. It turns out though, that vimari does the same thing for Safari and bytes in has a list of similar software to allow mouseless browsing with other browsers. There’s even disable-mouse if you want to enforce mouseless editing within Emacs.
Most of us probably wouldn’t want to do away with a mouse in most situations, but it’s nice to know that it’s possible. I might try vimari out to see if browsing without a mouse is feasible. If that were to be the case, essentially all my computing could be done without a mouse.