‘The Writing Ball is a thing like me: of iron Yet twisted easily - especially on journeys. Patience and tact must be had in abundance As well as fine [little] fingers to use us.’
What about stenograph machines? They allow you to type 3x faster than traditional keyboards. Left hand is starting consonants, Right hand is ending consonants, thumb is vowels. Since it is a chorded keyboard, you can have every single key be a "SHIFT", "CTRL" type key, and it made it easy to type keys in different rows at the same time since their was little space between the key rows (between E and D). Other Ideas: In addition to removing the spaces between the keys to allow chorded keys (E+D), maybe you can have two or three pressure sensitivity like on touch screens. Weak pressure sensitivity is used for swiping gestures across multiple keys, middle is used for typing, and hard press would be used for commands or in LISP deep A would mean (A|) where | is the cursor. Moving the entire keyboard brick when the keyboards are seperated can maybe be used as a rough mouse, with more precise can be done via swiping. As cameras become cheaper and more ubiquitous you can use it to look at other hand movements other than typing like rotating wrists, lifting fingers up high or pointing at the screen. However, Microsoft Kinect and Playstation Camera that do this kind of tracking have kinks in it (just like voice acting which is very good at coding S-Expression type languages) to work in real life.
aoeu256 THANK YOU. I just watched this -- great video, by the way -- and thought the same thing. If you're going to talk about the ways humans have experimented with the placement of letters on the keyboard, how could you ignore the history of the Steno keyboard? I know you're talking about keyboards from a programmer's perspective, but I think stenography has also contributed to the modern day keyboard in certain ways (ever heard of the asterisk?) Now, I'm a stenographer so I can't help but think about it constantly (my mind is turning every word I hear or read or speak into Steno 24/7) so of course I thought of it here. The fact that there are multiple theories saying what letters go where for the same keyboard is in itself awesome. Also awesome about Steno keyboards is the number of keys. And even though there are so few, (in my theory, at least) there is an R, an S, and a T on both sides. And through various combinations of these letters, you can write other letters (TPH = N on the initial [left] side) and in fact, you can write the entire alphabet with your left hand (unless you only use your right thumb for the final side vowel keys E and U, but you could use the left if you had to). Not to mention the keyboard itself has no letters on it. This is for a very important reason. In order to maintain writing speeds at up to and over 250 words per minute, one is to avoid looking at their hands. This causes the brain to double-process the words instead of hearing the word and stroking the keyboard without hesitation, as it's supposed to be. The most interesting part of stenography is the actual way the keyboard is used. Instead of hitting one key at a time, it is played more like a piano by stroking the keys. One stroke, therefore, does not create one letter but (at the least) one syllable or one word. Briefs are created to make it possible to write high frequency phrases in one movement. So, for example, in one stroke of the keyboard I can write "State your full legal name and address for the record" or "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury" or other phrases that come up frequently like "beyond a reasonable doubt" or "from time to time" and similar phrases that are used frequently. You would be surprised to see how much of my writing can usually be done in briefs. Much of what we say is the same stuff over and over, just arranged in a different order. As you can tell.... I am a little obsessed.
There are a lot of stenograph software mods/keymaps in the Ergodox firmware already, e.g. github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/tree/master/keyboards/ergodox/ez/keymaps/steno
You don't buy it, you build it! You can download the files from thingiverse or go to the dactyl's github page. (googling "dactyl github" should get you where you need to be. Also... There's a newer variant of the Dactyl, called the Dactyl Manuform, that has a different thumb cluster. It also has a github page (again, "dactyl manuform github" google search should do the trick) or you can buy this for a somewhat reasonable price at www.hidtech.ca/?product=dactyl-manuform#page-content
‘The Writing Ball is a thing like me: of iron
Yet twisted easily - especially on journeys.
Patience and tact must be had in abundance
As well as fine [little] fingers to use us.’
This is perhaps the coolest thing I've ever seen made in clojure
APL is awesome, it has a superior REPL interaction over LISPs, precisely because it has no parenthesis
What about stenograph machines? They allow you to type 3x faster than traditional keyboards. Left hand is starting consonants, Right hand is ending consonants, thumb is vowels. Since it is a chorded keyboard, you can have every single key be a "SHIFT", "CTRL" type key, and it made it easy to type keys in different rows at the same time since their was little space between the key rows (between E and D).
Other Ideas:
In addition to removing the spaces between the keys to allow chorded keys (E+D), maybe you can have two or three pressure sensitivity like on touch screens. Weak pressure sensitivity is used for swiping gestures across multiple keys, middle is used for typing, and hard press would be used for commands or in LISP deep A would mean (A|) where | is the cursor.
Moving the entire keyboard brick when the keyboards are seperated can maybe be used as a rough mouse, with more precise can be done via swiping.
As cameras become cheaper and more ubiquitous you can use it to look at other hand movements other than typing like rotating wrists, lifting fingers up high or pointing at the screen. However, Microsoft Kinect and Playstation Camera that do this kind of tracking have kinks in it (just like voice acting which is very good at coding S-Expression type languages) to work in real life.
aoeu256 THANK YOU. I just watched this -- great video, by the way -- and thought the same thing. If you're going to talk about the ways humans have experimented with the placement of letters on the keyboard, how could you ignore the history of the Steno keyboard? I know you're talking about keyboards from a programmer's perspective, but I think stenography has also contributed to the modern day keyboard in certain ways (ever heard of the asterisk?) Now, I'm a stenographer so I can't help but think about it constantly (my mind is turning every word I hear or read or speak into Steno 24/7) so of course I thought of it here. The fact that there are multiple theories saying what letters go where for the same keyboard is in itself awesome. Also awesome about Steno keyboards is the number of keys. And even though there are so few, (in my theory, at least) there is an R, an S, and a T on both sides. And through various combinations of these letters, you can write other letters (TPH = N on the initial [left] side) and in fact, you can write the entire alphabet with your left hand (unless you only use your right thumb for the final side vowel keys E and U, but you could use the left if you had to). Not to mention the keyboard itself has no letters on it. This is for a very important reason. In order to maintain writing speeds at up to and over 250 words per minute, one is to avoid looking at their hands. This causes the brain to double-process the words instead of hearing the word and stroking the keyboard without hesitation, as it's supposed to be. The most interesting part of stenography is the actual way the keyboard is used. Instead of hitting one key at a time, it is played more like a piano by stroking the keys. One stroke, therefore, does not create one letter but (at the least) one syllable or one word. Briefs are created to make it possible to write high frequency phrases in one movement. So, for example, in one stroke of the keyboard I can write "State your full legal name and address for the record" or "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury" or other phrases that come up frequently like "beyond a reasonable doubt" or "from time to time" and similar phrases that are used frequently. You would be surprised to see how much of my writing can usually be done in briefs. Much of what we say is the same stuff over and over, just arranged in a different order. As you can tell.... I am a little obsessed.
There are a lot of stenograph software mods/keymaps in the Ergodox firmware already, e.g. github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/tree/master/keyboards/ergodox/ez/keymaps/steno
very cool. Where can I get one please? Thank you
Fully awesome!!! But on PCB "This is madness" - is it really Comic Sans? :)
+Yuriy Pitometsu Indeed, it is :)
Great talk! I dig into it!
So!!! awesome!!, i need one of those!
BTW how you make DIY flexible PCB?
+Yuriy Pitometsu I use this stuff from Smoking Resistor: www.smokingresistor.com/product/pyralux-lf9120r/
Fantastic! Where can I DL the STLs?
This is going to sound lame but what's your color scheme? It's great!
Ah I would have thought it was base16-oceans-dark, thanks!
Where can you buy one of these?
You don't buy it, you build it! You can download the files from thingiverse or go to the dactyl's github page. (googling "dactyl github" should get you where you need to be.
Also... There's a newer variant of the Dactyl, called the Dactyl Manuform, that has a different thumb cluster. It also has a github page (again, "dactyl manuform github" google search should do the trick) or you can buy this for a somewhat reasonable price at www.hidtech.ca/?product=dactyl-manuform#page-content
But building has advantages, namely, you get to set the dimensions of the keyboard based on your personal hand size.