minimalist keyboards - WHY?

[in10did]

Hi Scarpia,

"Doug Engelbart began experimenting with keysets to use with the mouse in the mid 1960s [...] Engelbart used the keyset with his left hand and the mouse with his right to type text and enter commands."

A very short video demo of an Arduino recreation of Doug's keyset

I had toyed with the idea of a keyset design, but the biggest hurdle to jump was how to teach using it. The video above offers a possible suggestion, of guiding successive key presses, which are held until the combination is complete, followed by releasing all the keys. The combinations of key-press sequences amounts to well over a thousand possibilities, all from only five keys. Fewer keys could actually be used, I suppose, if the range of combinations does not need to be so huge.

Doug had a more direct, power-of-two for each digit, instead of the key-press sequence method above:

Doug describes the operation of his keyset design

Awesome to see plus the mother of all demos from 1968. I've been building my own chord keyboard but with 10 keys, 2 for each finger so one-handed mobile touch-typing with BTLE. Don't really know if there is much of a market for it but I figure what the hell, you only go around once. $125 bucks on Amazon called DecaTxt.

[jacobolus]

Who says a key has to be depressed to actuate, or that a switch can't have multiple actuation levels with different semantics?

Nobody did. But you should probably tread carefully with such a design. If you make it so the arrow keys repeat 2x faster when you press them further down, that could be fine. I suspect most fancier uses of such tech are going to get really annoying in practice though.

Throwing away your Cherries [...] and Topres?

Seems reasonable. Both are pretty mediocre, boring switches.

[Scarpia]

[...]I suspect most fancier uses of such tech are going to get really annoying in practice though

Fair points. And not being skilled in touch typing myself, I really can't say what design would be effective (and which would be rubbish) for high-WPM users

[Touch_It]

I'm not sure what all this fuss is about not having mouse space with full-sized keyboards.

Just kidding. All I do is slide it to the left a bit and life is good. I'll never give up my behemoths, for any reason!

k.jpg

Beautiful. As I like to say, more bigger more better. (To a point) the biggest I think I can go is my model F 107 key. I could maybe do a tkl, but I use my numpad a lot and would definitely miss it. There are a few scenarios where I'd like a 60 percent. Mostly for portability when I go into the field and am working in a tight space.

[livingspeedbump]

I use a mixture of many layouts, all simply depending on what I need at any given workstation/setup.

I exclusively use full size keyboards in the office, anything less would make my job much more difficult. I have a TKL on my home computer and don't often find myself missing any of the numpad keys, and travel with my HHKB almost everyone to make typing emails on the go much easier.

40%'s are still very small. They are a fun novelty, and can be relatively fun to use, but not for anything serious. At least not for me.

[csmith]

If you slide your keyboard to the left a bit, don't your hands slide to the left a bit too?

[jacobolus]

If you slide your keyboard to the left a bit, don't your hands slide to the left a bit too?

Nope. I just type with my left hand home row as FGHJ, and my right hand home row as return, delete, end, page down. Doesn’t everyone else do the same?