Scroll repeat key press delay

[nagy135]

Hello,

just wanted to ask about scroll mode movement and how it relates to system settings and keyrepeating when holding a key down.

There is this small delay after you start holding key before it starts sending it repeatedly and also there is different os setting for how fast does it repeat it etc. I would assume that we are directly using this same mechanism for mouse movement event when pressing a key.

Question is, could we not have that small delay there? Maybe let user configure certain keybind in scroll mode that would bypass that? I mean, it has some uses, when you want to do small delicate cursor adjustments, it makes sense to have this safety, to not overshoot, but when you want to traverse the screen diagonally, it becomes quite a challenge.

Maybe it should even allow user to press two buttons at once to travel diagonally if you plan to implement this.
My use of scroll movement is that i have two different sets of binds:

• hjkl => fast 40px jumps
• arrows or shift+hjkl => small 10px jumps

I think both of those should be preserved where small one has delay before repeat and fast one doesnt.

Very small issue, mostly just wanted to ask how this works and if that maybe is very simple to achieve.

[y3owk1n]

Hey there, yes, there's a couple of PR that touches base on this, and it's already configurable. Internally we have a custom implementation to bypass the default macOS repeat, but it's disabled by default (no surprises). Note that these bypass only works on certain actions, which is move_mouse_relative and scroll related actions.

The delay that you encountered are just plain macOS default key repeat, it happens everywhere, you can verify it by going to a text box anywhere, and just hold down any key (e.g. j key), and notice the first delay.

• configuration docs -> https://github.com/y3owk1n/neru/blob/main/docs/CONFIGURATION.md#held_repeat

PR related:

• feat(config): make held-key repeat configurable #914
• fix(hotkeys): ensure consistent initialdelay with interval for repeat #872
• fix(hotkey): eliminate initial repeat delay for held-key actions #819
• feat(hotkey): repeat global hotkey actions while held automatically #817

For the simultaneous press like up and left to run together, it's also just macOS limitation by default. By setting the held_repeat override that we implemented, you will notice that pressing both key together will work as what you described (hopefully XD).

---

Try the config out and feel free to play around with the values that suits you the best. Setting it too low might causes issue where a single quick press results in double invocation.

[y3owk1n]

Another side note, there are lots of configuration that are disabled by default, I have the mindset where when it touches on things like overriding system behaviour and performance changes, it will be implemented but opt-in rather than opt-out.

[nagy135]

awesome, should have looked deeper into config. Only thing i would change is that this is global for every mode and even fine tune movement at the end of grid selection. It would make sense to have it just in scroll and even there just for specific binds. "Would be nice" kind of category of features but minor for sure.

I like that opt-in opinion, for sure that is the way to go ...I would personally prefer to have those written in default config tho. Because to discover some features, configuration page is too long and having that "enabled=false" in config would make users curious to try even without investing time to read the docs.

Thanks again for solving my issue 😊

[y3owk1n]

awesome, should have looked deeper into config. Only thing i would change is that this is global for every mode and even fine tune movement at the end of grid selection. It would make sense to have it just in scroll and even there just for specific binds. "Would be nice" kind of category of features but minor for sure.

At this moment, it only applies to several commands that make sense for the overrides, the commands are (scroll_*, page_*, and move_mouse_relative, the rest of the commands are all ignored. I decided to make it fully toggle-able only in the config but not in each action because it needs to track some global state to decide on when to repeat and etc. It's very easy to introduce weird race conditions without good care. I'll take note on this.

I like that opt-in opinion, for sure that is the way to go ...I would personally prefer to have those written in default config tho. Because to discover some features, configuration page is too long and having that "enabled=false" in config would make users curious to try even without investing time to read the docs.

I think it's already in the default-config. The issue might be that maybe you had a config initialised early than this implementation, and when this was implemented and added to default config, it doesn't upgrade your config automatically on version bump for obvious reason.

I always wanted to either have a proper documentation website (but I am lazy). And I also thought about providing a neru config diff for users to diff against the latest default config against their current config, but i never started this at all.. haha

The configuration docs is definitely very long, i also wanted to rewrite the docs and maybe with guides, but I am not a good docs writer at all XD.

Thanks again for solving my issue 😊

No problem at all ~

[nagy135]

the idea was that not all move_mouse_relative should have the same setup of those values, that would definitely be good addition but if there are priorities, totally understandable. If that ever gets introduced, please bump me here :)

All good dude, you are doing amazing job, its hard to appreciate how big of a effect tool like this has to person who really uses it, currently i open a mode i swear 1000 times a day and its awesome to have active development with such a high responsiveness ❤️

[y3owk1n]

the idea was that not all move_mouse_relative should have the same setup of those values, that would definitely be good addition but if there are priorities, totally understandable. If that ever gets introduced, please bump me here :)

No problem!

All good dude, you are doing amazing job, its hard to appreciate how big of a effect tool like this has to person who really uses it, currently i open a mode i swear 1000 times a day and its awesome to have active development with such a high responsiveness ❤️

Thanks for all the good words, glad that Neru actually do real work that helps your mouseless workflow better.