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It would be great if it was possible to draw in the sprite and map editors using only the keyboard (i.e. without requiring the use of a mouse/touchpad). With sprites being only 8x8, I find myself wanting an easy way to precisely move the cursor by one pixel at a time instead of the inherent looseness/analogueness of a mouse/touchpad.

I also think in general it might be thematically fitting for all of PICO-8's editor modes to be completely useable without requiring a mouse, to be similar to older computers for which mice were either optional peripherals or not present at all :)

P#23568 2016-06-24 18:30 ( Edited 2016-09-09 20:56)

Yep. I'm with you KMaster. I'm finishing up work with a program called TileMaster. It is designed specifically for editing tiles and does not use the mouse, it uses only the keyboard and is very intuitive and fast.

I draw all my 8x8 tiles using it.

I will reply back in here when I have a working copy for you to examine.

Fully agree, mouse likely would not exist in a time that would match PICO's limitations. I would be for keyboard ALL THE WAY ! :)

P#27913 2016-09-02 14:19 ( Edited 2016-09-02 18:35)

I just found out that you CAN draw with your keyboard!

This website let me know about it! ^^
At the "keys" section i found out that you can enable the keyboard mouse with F10!
It isn't optimal but pretty good! Y acts as left click and X as right click (if using standard controls).
Also you can switch between the different editors with ALT+Left/Right, and between the submenus with the tabulator key!

So yeah... Hope that helped! ^^

P#28087 2016-09-06 09:52 ( Edited 2016-09-06 14:08)

Hi C0merl. Yep, I knew about this, but it's not like Tilemaster where one arrow keystroke moves an entire pixel. Of course that program uses keyboard only to manipulate tiles.

P#28090 2016-09-06 11:32 ( Edited 2016-09-06 15:32)

Thanks c0merl! That's a great resource!

P#28097 2016-09-06 13:11 ( Edited 2016-09-06 17:11)

oh yeah, I forgot to update this thread

I was actually the one who opened the pull request that added that F10 key to that cheat sheet :D

it's not in the manual, but I think someone on Slack told me about it.

Additionally, the most recent version of PICO-8 has a setting in config.txt that makes the keyboard cursor snap to each pixel, so you can now actually get the sort of control I was requesting:

// iff 1: when using keyboard cursor, snap to closest pixel / map cel
cursor_snap 1

so yay!

P#28230 2016-09-09 14:24 ( Edited 2016-09-09 18:24)

excellent! This'll be useful for my RPi portable outings with PICO-8. Been a pain to need a mouse, now I can just use a tiny portable keyboard!

P#28236 2016-09-09 16:56 ( Edited 2016-09-09 20:56)

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