Kick your mouse out of the house with this AI-assisted keyboard utility

software

Neverclick avoids being limited to certain apps by ditching accessibility APIs for a quick, lightweight computer vision model.

Imagine never having to reach for your mouse to navigate around Windows again. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Well wake up: We have some peripherals to burn.

Neverclick, from developer Lazo Velko, was published recently with the promise to allow users to perform mouse actions on every single object on their screen with nothing but keyboard shortcuts. Want to close a window, open an application, or click a particular spot on the screen with character-level precision? It’s capable of doing all that, along with selecting multiple spots to click at once to, say, close a bunch of windows at the same time. However, drag and drop and highlight don't work yet.

What’s more, Neverclick is completely free, has no account signup, doesn’t serve any ads or collect user data, and works entirely offline, Velko notes in the GitHub readme (the repo is currently for issue reporting only and doesn’t contain the full Neverclick source code).

Velko explains on the Neverclick website that he designed the app when he was dealing with a repetitive strain injury that made using a mouse difficult. 

“I recovered years ago, and I owe it to this software,” the self-professed C++ hater said of his project. “I still use Neverclick every day and can't imagine using my computer without it.”

Foolish El Reg reporter, I can hear you saying. This app is nothing new and will have the same problems as other ones: It simply won’t work with software that wasn’t built with accessibility in mind. Velko has heard those complaints, which as he explains in a comment in the Hacker News thread about his app, he didn’t build it with accessibility APIs. He used a computer vision model to perform raw pixel analysis and identify individual elements on the screen instead. 

“I've had a poor experience with accessibility apis, they're clunky, slow, and unpredictable,” Velko wrote in the thread. “With computer vision you don't have to worry about that.”

Velko told The Register in an email that he built the computer vision system himself without relying on any third-party libraries, and he claims that it works far faster than the UI Automation accessibility system in Windows. 

“I have users that use Neverclick on 10 year old hardware and they tell me that the [computer vision] runs instantly whereas UI Automation is super laggy for them,” Velko wrote on Hacker News. “I can't believe that accessibility APIs are so poorly optimized that raw pixel analysis is faster.” 

According to Velko, the computer vision model used by Neverclick is small, with the entire app only needing around 40 MB of hard drive space, and using around 200 MB of memory on a typical 1080p monitor when in use, though that varies by resolution and other factors. Neverclock doesn’t run in a continuous loop either, so shouldn’t eat up any CPU unless it’s called on for use. 

El Reg US Editor Avram Piltch tried Neverclick out on his Windows PC. As described in the documentation, he was able to activate the software by hitting Ctrl + Enter for left-click or Alt + Enter for Ctrl + Left Click (there's no right click mapped by default but you can configure one).

After hitting one of those two key combos, his screen was covered in two-letter key combos that the software calls "hints" (e.g. ek, af, jj, etc). If he typed one of those combos, the cursor clicked in that exact spot, whether it was a button, a menu option, or just the middle of a word. Word hints click in the center of a word by default, but you can hit a number like 0 to get to a particular letter.

There are also keyboard shortcuts for switching windows. And you get a choice of having the hints appear only in the active window or all throughout your screen. However, the UI can be overwhelming. It is nearly impossible to see all the menus and icons with the hints covering over them. And to make the overlay go away, you have to click.

Neverclick overlay in Notepad++. It's nearly impossible to see a lot of the text and menu items with the hints in place. Avram Piltch

We also noticed that the default shortcut of Ctrl + Enter overrides the same shortcut in other apps. For example, Ctrl + Enter is supposed to send an email in Gmail, but with Neverclick running, it brings up the overlay instead.

Neverclick is a Windows-only app for now. Velko said a macOS version is in the works, but he doesn’t have a timeline, he told us in an email. 

“I'm quite overworked and still need to release a few features for Windows,” he explained. Those features include window dragging and text highlighting by selecting two different hints, triggering whatever text editor is being used to highlight whatever’s between them.

You can install Neverclick from its website and it's available now. Once it comes to macOS, you’ll be able to combine it with the AirPods app we wrote about last week that allows users to scroll their screens by tilting their heads up and down for a truly mouse-free experience. ®