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!
Alternative Ways to Open Menus
Tutorials and Guides for Specific Tools
Section titled “ Tutorials and Guides for Specific Tools”Below are some tutorials and guides for specific tools which show you how to open Kando menus with these tools. If you want to share your own guide, please let us know! You can either open an issue, edit this file, or join the Discord server to discuss your idea!
| Tool | OS | Free | Features | Kando Tutorial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AutoHotkey (Homepage) | ✅ | 🖱️ + ✍️ + 🎮 | → Tutorial | |
| Input Remapper (Homepage) | ✅ | 🖱️ + ✍️ + 🎮 | → Tutorial | |
| Karabiner-Elements (Homepage) | ✅ | 🖱️ + ✍️ | → Tutorial | |
| BetterMouse (Homepage) | ❌ | 🖱️ | → Tutorial | |
| BetterTouchTool (Homepage) | ❌ | 🖱️ + ✍️ + 👆 | → Tutorial | |
| Kanata (Homepage) | + + | ✅ | ⌨️ | → Tutorial |
Features Legend
Section titled “Features Legend”- 🖱️ Allows you to bind menus to mouse buttons.
- ✍️ Start Marking Mode by holding down a mouse button.
- 🎮 With this, you can bind menus to controller buttons.
- 👆 Allows you to bind menus to gestures.
- ⌨️ Open menus with complex key chords.
More Third-Party Tools
Section titled “More Third-Party Tools”We do not have specific guides for these tools yet, but they should work with Kando as well. Feel free to experiment with them and share your findings with us! You can even write a tutorial for one of these tools if you want to share your knowledge with the community!
- GestureSign allows opening a Kando menu with multi-touch taps and gestures on both touchpad and touchscreen.
- Multitouch allows to add keyboard shortcut as a gesture for trackpad or Apple Magic Mouse.
- 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.
- 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.
How Can I Open Menus with These Tools?
Section titled “How Can I Open Menus with These Tools?”Fundamentally, there are two main ways to open Kando menus from these tools.
You can either open a menu by simulating the shortcut for the menu (if this is supported by the tool), or you can make the tool call the Kando executable with the --menu "menu name" or --trigger <shortcut> 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.
Many mice even 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 open Kando menus with mouse buttons.
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 --menu or --trigger
Section titled “Option 2: Use --menu or --trigger”With the --menu and --trigger arguments, you can open a Kando menu by calling the Kando executable with the name or shortcut 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 "Example Menu"%localappdata%\Kando\app-<version number>\Kando.exe --trigger Control+Space/Applications/Kando.app/Contents/MacOS/Kando --menu "Example Menu"/Applications/Kando.app/Contents/MacOS/Kando --trigger Control+Space/usr/bin/kando --menu "Example Menu"/usr/bin/kando --trigger Control+Spaceflatpak run menu.kando.Kando --menu "Example Menu"flatpak run menu.kando.Kando --trigger Control+Space