Control PC programs with global mouse gestures, using StrokeIt


StrokeIt is a free (for personal use) advanced mouse gesture recognition engine and command processor. Mouse gestures are schemes that you “draw” on your screen using your mouse.

When you perform a mouse gesture that StrokeIt can recognize, such as a circle, a line, etc., it will perform the “action” associated with that gesture. The purpose of this technique, already used in browsers (although many people ignore it), is to let us control the system more effectively, minimizing the distances we have to cover in order to activate frequently used buttons and commands (close, open, new, save, etc).

StrokeIt currently can recognize more than 80 mouse gestures and can be easily trained to recognize many more. For each gesture recognized, StrokeIt can execute a user-defined set of commands within the active application. StrokeIt commands are defined within plugin libraries that can be easily created by third parties to do nearly anything.

To perform a gesture click and hold down the right mouse button and then draw the mouse gesture you want. You can temporarily disable StrokeIt by holding down the Control key, or right clicking on the StrokeIt icon in the system tray. You can also disable it for certain applications (such as your browser, which might already have its own gestures plugin).