Yes, I know of the existance of the Jaws curser, ------ and your point is what?
well if that's everything goodbye!
oooooh sorry Elliott, but perhaps this is an occasion where a litle post rereading might help.
to answer the question I believe your implying here, yes, hal most certainly does have a similar function to the Jaws curser. It is known as the virtual focus, ----- or area virtual focus, depending upon the aplication and how it's being used. there are various things you can do with it, and lots and lots of keys to make your life easier, but sinse it's normally activated by the number pad (along with most of Hal's other functions), you won't be able to use it on a laptop until you've done a litle configuration.
So, to answer your actual question, to use Hal on a Laptop you'll need to set it to use the Laptop keyboard.
to do this, open hals' control panel (ctrl space), and find the "Keyboard item" in the configuration menue. In the first list box, select your keyboard, ----- which in your case elliott would be laptop. If you press tab twice, you can get to the list box containing the various default key sets available. Personally, I'd suggest you use the default function key set (I used it myself for many years), but if you've been using Jaws, you might wish to use the Jfw emulation keyset, ----- though this might make a couple of Hal's functions difficult to opperate (I certainly found that in the change from Hal V4 to Hal V5, when I was trying to access all of V5's functions using the V4 keyset).
there are many, many keys associated with the Virtual focus and other functions in Hal, (reading the manual or checking the (hotkeys" item in the configuration menue might be a plan), but I'll just list a few here from the default Function key set that might be helpful to you, of course, if you decide to use the jfw keyset some of these probably will be different.
Activate Area Vf: F2 (will default to plane Vf if no area Vf available).
Move through controls, boxes etc in Vf: Tab (shift tab to go backwards, alt tab to switch windows).
Activate interactive mode (so that you can use Vf to type in text boxes etc): enter.
Move by frame or other large amount of info in Vf: Pg up and down.
Move to start or end of line in Vf: Home/end.
Move to top or bottom of window or whatever in Vf: Ctrl home/end.
Perform click in Vf: Space bar (pressing A or Q will perform left or right mouse clicks).
Toggle Auto Vf: Ctrl 4 (this will automatically go into area Vf or interactive mode when needed, personally I find it slightly annoying, but you might not).
document read: F 11 (continually reads from curser or Vf position, can be stopped with escape, ctrl or F11 again).
Read line: F5.
Read window: F9.
Toggle Voice off: Ctrl 0.
Toggle Hotkeys off: Ctrl 8 (if using the function keyset, you'll need to do this before playing most audio games sinse they tend to use the F keys).
Capslock 1 (also called dolphin key 1): list all links on a page. Pressing tab will lett you choose to left click or route the Vf to the specified link, and change the order in which the links are displayed in the list.
there are various others, but that's probably enough to be going on with for now.
Hope this helps.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)