While Kando does not have a builtin way to open menus with mouse buttons or touch gestures, there are many platform-dependent third-party tools which can help you with this.
Opening Menus with Mouse Buttons
How to Open Menus From Other Tools
Section titled “How to Open Menus From Other Tools”You can either make the third-party tool open the menu by simulation the shortcut for the menu, or it can directly call the Kando executable with the --menu "menu name" argument.
Option 1: Simulate the Shortcut
Section titled “Option 1: Simulate the Shortcut”If the third-party tool supports simulating keyboard shortcuts, it is recommended to use this method. In most cases, this will be a bit faster then option 2.
You can choose any shortcut you like! Using one which does not interfere with you workflow is a good idea. For instance Ctrl+F13 is usually not used by any application, so it is a good choice.
Option 2: Use the --menu Argument
Section titled “Option 2: Use the --menu Argument”With the --menu argument, you can open a Kando menu by calling the Kando executable with the name of the menu you want to open.
Depending on your operating system, the command to open a Kando menu would look like this:
%localappdata%\Kando\app-<version number>\Kando.exe --menu "Menu Name"/Applications/Kando.app/Contents/MacOS/Kando --menu "Menu Name"/usr/bin/kando --menu "Menu Name"flatpak run menu.kando.Kando --menu "Menu Name"Third-Party Tools for Opening Menus
Section titled “Third-Party Tools for Opening Menus”Many mice come with special drivers which allow you to rebind mouse buttons to keyboard shortcuts or to run arbitrary commands. If your mouse supports this, this is an easy way to
If you do not have such a driver, you can use any of the third-party tools listed below. Most of them are free and open-source.
- AutoHotkey is a powerful scripting language for Windows. You can use it to run the kando command when you press a mouse button or to remap a mouse button to a keyboard shortcut which opens a Kando menu. You can follow this guide for a complete example.
- GestureSign allows opening a Kando menu with multi-touch taps and gestures on both touchpad and touchscreen.
- Karabiner-Elements can be used to remap mouse buttons to keyboard shortcuts.
- BetterTouchTool allows opening a Kando menu via touchpad gestures.
- Multitouch allows to add keyboard shortcut as a gesture for trackpad or Apple Magic Mouse.
- BetterMouse is a tool which allows you to remap mouse buttons to keyboard shortcuts.
- fusuma together with it’s sendkey plugin can be used to open a Kando menu with touchpad or touchscreen gestures. It works on X11 and Wayland.
- Input Remapper is a tool which allows you to remap mouse buttons to keyboard shortcuts. It works both on X11 and Wayland.
- Touchegg is a multitouch gesture recognizer for Linux. You can use it to open a Kando menu with touchpad gestures. It only works on X11.
- KDE Plasma comes with built-in support for remapping mouse buttons to keyboard shortcuts. You can find this feature in the system settings under “System Settings” / “Mouse & Touchpad” / “Add Binding”.
- There’s a Configurable Button widget for KDE Plasma which allows running
kando --menu "menu name"when clicked. - On GNOME Shell, you can use the CHC-E (Custom Hot Corners - Extended) extension to run arbitrary commands when you move your mouse to a corner of the screen.
- On GNOME Shell, you can also use the Floating Dock. It requires a bit of tinkering as you need to create custom desktop files for each menu you want to open. However, it allows you to open menus by clicking on a floating dock icon.