Disable the mouse in Emacs

Want to force yourself to use the keyboard in Emacs, and you don't have a cat available to obstruct your trackpad? Use this local or global minor mode to suppress the default mouse behaviours.

Installation

Manual

Ensure disable-mouse.el is in a directory on your load-path, and add the following to your ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

(require 'disable-mouse)
(global-disable-mouse-mode)

If you use Evil, this may be insufficient, since the keymaps for Evil's individual states will contain bindings for mouse events. disable-mouse provides a function disable-mouse-in-keymap which you can use to neutralise any keymap, so Evil users might use a snippet like the following in addition to that above:

(mapc #'disable-mouse-in-keymap
  (list evil-motion-state-map
        evil-normal-state-map
        evil-visual-state-map
        evil-insert-state-map))

Note that you won't be able to restore those Evil mouse bindings by turning off disable-mouse-mode. You'll need to restart Emacs instead.

MELPA

If you're an Emacs 24 user or you have a recent version of package.el you can install disable-mouse from the MELPA repository. The version of disable-mouse there will always be up-to-date.

Enable global-disable-mouse-mode with M-x global-disable-mouse-mode, by using the customisation interface, or by adding code such as the following to your emacs startup file:

(global-disable-mouse-mode)

If you want to only disable the mouse in only a certain mode, add disable-mouse-mode to that mode's hook.

Related packages

After writing this, I found handoff, which has a similar goal, but aims for more annoyance and frivolity.

About

Author: Steve Purcell

Homepage: https://github.com/purcell/disable-mouse

This little library was extracted from the author's full Emacs configuration, which readers might find of interest.