From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 15:49:56 -0600 From: "Eric Van Hensbergen" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] The utility of a chording pad In-Reply-To: <7204efbdee8bf0cec2284a4f8ed64276@csplan9.rit.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <7204efbdee8bf0cec2284a4f8ed64276@csplan9.rit.edu> Topicbox-Message-UUID: eca69cea-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 8/4/07, john@csplan9.rit.edu wrote: > So I've spent a lot of time today watching recordings of Engelbart's > 1968 demonstration (http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html), > and I really like the chording pad he has over on the left of his keyboard. > It's the same type of thing that shows up again in the Xerox Alto. > I'm just wondering, as Plan 9 users and developers, what would you do > with such a thing in the environment? Engelbart's device apparently > let you input 31 different chords, which I'd say isn't sufficient to replace > a keyboard but is still pretty impressive; with such a thing, would you perhaps > bind the chords to perform acme commands, for instance? We've already > got mouse chording, and it's pretty slick; add some more chording in, > say hit the first two keys in order to delete the current frame in acme. > Of course, if we were to get a chord pad that could produce enough > combinations for all alphanumeric characters, it could be used to replace > the keyboard. > > I'd just like to get some opinions, see what you think of chording devices > and what potential utility they could have in Plan 9. > I always thought it'd be cool to hack up something for http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=157024 to do left handed chording and keep the right hand on the mouse. I bought one and played around a bit, but was unsatisfied with my ability to actually detect chords without writing a proper driver IIRC. I experimented a bunch with different chording setups a decade ago and found most unsatisfactory, but half-keyboard chordic setups seem to be quite easy to pick up - the problem with the Nostromo was that it was like 2 keys short of being a proper half keyboard so you needed more than one meta-key ... which was offputting. Plus no numbers made it kinda hard to code with. -eric