Using Ardour without a mouse (keyboard only) possible?

Hello!

Like most users (I imagine), I’ve been using my mouse to do nearly everything in Ardour. However, I finally learned some basic transport bindings and (re)-discovered the keyboard shortcuts menu

I am an emacs user (for life), and in that context my question might not be too surprising: is it possible to use Ardour without a mouse at all (ie. only navigating via keybindings)? Obviously plugins require some mouse usage, so I won’t be totally crushed if the answer is no. Just curious if anyone has gone as far as say 80% or more by keyboard.

I expect there are many operations in the GUI that cannot be accessed by just using keyboard.

Notably everything that responds to “touch”. This includes all automatable parameters, notably Faders. Start a new event on mouse-down … hold and drag … release (compare to touch sensitive motorized control surfaces).

Focus and selection in the Editor is also streamlined for a (3 button) mouse.
The combined use of mouse and keyboard is very ergonomic for authoring tools.

Yet, Ardour’s remote control possibilities are vast. Almost every action is is accessible via OSC - The Ardour Manual - Controlling Ardour with OSC and there is support for various control surfaces, which can greatly reduce the use of mouse and keyboard.


… and if you want to go all in, you can use Ardours commandline interface. That requires no mouse at all, run

/opt/Ardour-8.6.0/bin/ardour8-lua

and see The Ardour Manual - Lua Scripting.

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