Engelbart's Violin - chorded keyboards

I succumb to these emotions from time to time, but it's worth noting that—software wise—you can certainly live in the past we hoped we'd have if you put in a modicum of effort:<p>Plan 9: actively maintained, runs well in a VM: <a href="http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/" rel="nofollow">http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/</a><p>Smalltalk: many options, notably Pharo: <a href="http://www.pharo-project.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.pharo-project.org</a><p>Lisp machine emulators: <a href="http://www.unlambda.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.unlambda.com/</a><p>Haiku is approaching a 1.0 release quickly: <a href="http://haiku-os.org/" rel="nofollow">http://haiku-os.org/</a><p>And of course you can have a "real" keyboard if you desire, such as the Kinesis Ergo: <a href="http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/</a> Switching to this keyboard and the Dvorak layout is certainly an upgrade from consumer to professional equipment and, requiring about a month to retrain, will certainly dispel the illusion that discomfort is an essential and missing part of acquiring expertise at computing. The fact that I type faster than my peers makes the fact that I write code much more slowly than them all the more bizarre.<p>I'd love to know why superior technologies fail to conquer markets, particularly enabling technologies like Smalltalk, but my point is that our man Stanislav has no excuse: they exist <i>now</i> and he knows about them and can use them right now if he wants. Instead he seems to be embarking on some kind of ambitious hardware project. Good luck to him on that, but if his definition of success greatly exceeds (say) CoffeeScript or BeOS's success, he can expect failure, regardless of how long his ideas endure or how influential they are.

I was the co-patent holder of Microwriting with Cy Endfield (film director - Zulu). 25000 people purchased the Microwriter and the follow on machine the AgendA which was a true pocket organiser, diary, alarm etc and was a fore runner to many of the current machines and was manufactured from 1987 to 1991. It only failed because of the economic downturn of the early 1990's when Sir Mark Weinberg withdrew from the project after investing a lot of money in a new machine which over stretched the finances of the company. The CyKey (the name is a tribute to Cy Endfield) is still available as an add on to a PC or Mac and was developed to fill a gap and was developed by us here in Devon. Basic Microwriting can be mastered in about 20 minutes by most people because of very clever mnemonics which Cy created; based on something we all already know-the shape of the letters!

&#62; This rather unimpressive “hello world” was achieved after around fifteen minutes of practice. What would it have been like if I had been put in front of an Endfield keyboard as a small child, instead of a typewriter monstrosity?<p>As someone who has played piano since he was eight, I can answer that question: you'd still be unusably slow.<p>This is the terrible secret of the chorded keyboard: it requires that you press multiple keys at once. Any good pianist can tell you that you can make your hand do high-speed delicate work, all over the keyboard, one note at a time, but dense chords cannot be moved through remotely as quickly, unless you're looking to develop carpal tunnnel. It's a misfeature of the mechanics of the human hand.

It's actually possible to turn some regular keyboards into steno machines, using opensource software: <a href="http://plover.stenoknight.com/" rel="nofollow">http://plover.stenoknight.com/</a><p>Steno produces syllables at a time via chording. They say with a few months practice you can get to 120 wpm, and eventually over 200. Users rave about how much more productive they are when they can type as fast as they think.<p>"Every word my characters said to me came up on the screen as quickly as they could have spoken them. Before, in the time it took me to type out the six or seven letters that made up each word, my brain would cloud over and I would start second-guessing myself so much it was a mighty battle even to get to the end of a sentence. With steno, most words came in a single stroke, so my text was able to keep ahead of my doubts and excuses and just keep going. I could write for half an hour on the subway going home, or pull out my gear and do a quick 10 minutes in the park before schlepping onward to my next gig. Before, I would have told myself that I didn't have time to get anything substantial done in those few scattered intervals, that I needed several solid hours to get into the flow and mood of writing. After learning steno, I couldn't get away with that ploy. Before I knew it, my 10 minutes were over, but I'd managed to fill half a dozen pages. It wasn't even the speed that helped me do it, primarily; it was the fluency that steno gave to my thinking." <a href="http://plover.stenoknight.com/2010/04/writing-and-coding-with-steno.html" rel="nofollow">http://plover.stenoknight.com/2010/04/writing-and-coding-wit...</a>

This is why I learned Vim and why I find its theory of interaction superior to other text editors.<p>Maybe a century down the road we will have vim-customized keyboards. Tangible keyboards will always have a place, I think, because they provide tactile feedback, unlike "pictures under glass" like you get with touch screens.

I wonder how much help mature 3D printing might be. You could already do a rough approximation of form-fitting case and keys for a one-hand chorded keyboard with today's printers. The microswitches and electronics would be all DIY though.<p>Looks like the Twiddler site is selling the things (<a href="http://www.handykey.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.handykey.com/</a>), but $200 is a lot for a thing I'm not sure would be any better than a regular keyboard. Also, thing like that really should be wireless. I do hope that with the ascent of mobile computing, we're going to see some more innovation with terminal design, since the age-old typewriter television paradigm really doesn't work on the move.<p>In general, besides RSI, I'm not sure how much the keyboard matters in the end. People who work in the analog, like carpenters, musicians and surgeons, can do better quality work with better quality instruments. But programmers work in the digital, like writers and mathematicians. Mathematicians don't generally worry about how the craftsmanship of their whiteboard markers affects the quality of their work.

I stumbled across this website a couple of weeks back, and I have to say this is my new favorite egomaniac.

In case they come to dominate as the input devices to eyewear displays in a (possibly haptic) glove like form factor; I've been mentally preparing myself to not arbitrarily dismiss these devices and learn their use. Such resistance to change is how people who were once ahead involuntarily fall into curmudgeonry.

Imagine a chorded keyboard on the left and right, with the right one (or perhaps both?) doubling as a mouse, with one or two of the keys assigned to mouse function. That's 2^8 to 2^11 different characters you can represent, and you never have to move your hand over to the mouse!

As far as proffessional equipment goes, we're there... I have an 8 core workstation with 8gb of ram and 2 24" monitors running linux with a window manager heavily customized by me.<p>Compare that to a macbook air.

imo, the [1]datahand keyboard makes a lot more sense than chorded keyboards. Each finger has access to four characters mapped to up, down, left or right. All it takes is a short movement of the finger to press a key.<p>[1] <a href="http://cdn1.mobilemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/image_64214_largeimagefile.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://cdn1.mobilemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/image_6...</a>

The issue unconsidered is that programming is nothing new. It's applicable algebra.<p>If we consider his idea in the realms of mathematics, amateurs and experts still only/mostly use a pencil, graph paper and their minds.<p>A keyboard and mouse is more than enough to code.