Tow and its accompanying tug boat image are very much works in progress.

an ergonomy helper for desktop zoom users.
Adding a little extra convenience to zoom.

Tow has the zoom area be 'towed' by the keyboard caret.

('caret' is possibly better known as 'text-cursor')

Tow is written to work with xfwm4 of the Xfce4 desktop, however it might work with other desktop environments as well. Your mileage may vary.

Users who depend on desktop zoom may appreciate tow. We want zoom but don't want it to be in our way.

If you think tow is cool convenience and want to help out, please consider buying me a coffee! ;)

Zoom users zoom-in a portion of their screen to magnify a region of interest. Whilst typing text, the text cursor (caret) moves, yet the zoomed view area stays put. Consequently the text cursor will be out of sight before soon, forcing the user to stop working to readjust the view area's position using the mouse or some other pointer device.

This pattern will repeat and becomes a nuisance to some.

Tow aims to automate the readjusting by having the zoom view port (the magnified area) be 'towed' by the text cursor (caret).

Applications that use a widget toolkit that supports AT-SPI2 (such as GTK or Qt), can share information regarding the carets position.

tow [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS: -D, --daemon Have tow be 'daemonized' / run in the background. -h, --help Prints help information -V, --version Prints version information

OPTIONS: -b, --behavior [ mode ] [ val ] Mode: 'pulse' [N: 100-10000] (ms) or 'typewriter' (default)

-s, --slide_duration [dur. in ms]  Duration of view port slide in ms [100-10000] only applies to pulse mode, otherwise ignored [default: 500]

• Tow 'works' but it has (many) flaws.

  Tow is unstable. We might want a cleaner state machine Your author would like all of the generate atspi ffi interface to be safe

  Your author would like CI on this repository.

  The main problems:

  Tow needs a runtime on/off hotkey.

Some programs do not implement accessibility as intended, this may lead to unwanted behavior. Therefore we need and option to opt-out during runtime.

We probably want to save settings at some point.

Detect and 'play nice' with policy kit.
Which may be as simple as prefixing with pk-exec?

[2019-04-16] Until tow can discern synthetic from device (mouse / pad / other) moves, inbetween moves lead to unwanted moves.

[2019-10-30] Sometimes tow makes an unexpected move. Need to find the origin of this.

prerequisites include . Rust development toolchain. . at-spi2-core

$ git clone https://github.com/luukvanderduim/tow.git

$ cd tow

$ cargo build --release

$ cargo run --release or

$ cargo install --path . (add --force on subsequent invocation)

$ tow

Yes, please!

If you can fix problems with tow - or - take accerciser to check your (app of interest) for Atk implementation shortcomings. Lets improve our ecosystem!

I would really love to see VSCode emit caret-moved events.

I would like to know how to pursuade Thunderbird to emit caret-moved events. Anyone?

Thank you so much in advance.

Don't hesitate to drop a line at:

luukvanderduim (-AT-) gmail (-dot-) com

This software is licenced MPL 2.0 Please see the LICENCE file.