Show HN: Engelbart's Chorded Keyboard - Built at SHDH42 yesterday

Interesting idea, but it's rather odd that the keystroke for P is pressing <SPACE>, but the keystroke for <SPACE> is a four character combination when <SPACE> should be its own chord. While the binary incrementing keystroke combination is somewhat logical, I would imagine that a more frequency-based assignment would ultimately be more successful as muscle memory is far more important than remembering that the chord for V is binary+1 of the chord for U.

This was really interesting to play with.

I kept getting caught up cognitively on the fact that the thumb corresponded to the 5th box in all of the chord diagrams. I feel like some visual differentiation would have made that easier to grok.

Cute. But I'd need a lot more than this for programming, which uses many special symbols. Even regular English requires being able to type quotes, question marks, exclamation points, numbers, etc..

Also, as far as the implementation of this particular typing tutor goes, it needs to let the user retry to type a given chords until he gets it right, instead of immediately moving on to the next one.

And the chords should be taught in small batches, rather than trying to teach them all at once.

While we're on the subject of chording, I should mention that there's a vim plugin that will let you map chorded keystrokes:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2425

I remember reading about Steve Roberts building chording keyboards into his "handlebars" on his Winnebiko years ago. Since he had well more than 2^5 bits using both hands[1], he was able to assign macros that helped significantly with his effective typing speed.

Englebart says that his layout is not intended for speed typing, with the typical trained typer being able to type 30-50wpm. He observed that typing speed on conventional keyboards does not have a strong correlation with typing speed on his chording layout. Sight-reading piano players have a bit of an advantage here, of course.

I've always wanted one of the Twiddlers, and am kind of excited they're back on the market, but I'd vastly prefer a wireless version. I've also been looking forward to the release of the FrogPad. It would be nice to have a better-than-touchscreen keyboard for emails on the iPad or iPhone.

[1] I can't remember the exact layout now. If it used all ten fingers, or if it had multiple positions for, say, thumbs, à la the BAT keyboard, it's gone from my memory. Regardless, it used both hands.

I was inspired by Englebert's "Mother of all Demos" shown at Super Happy Dev House 42 and decided to actually try out the device that was in his left hand.

If you're looking for a one-handed chorded keyboard on which to type, the BAT has been around for many years: http://www.infogrip.com/product_view.asp?RecordNumber=12

It's funny how it's not optimized at all. "E" and "T" are both incredibly hard to type; this would give you RSI problems in no time.

I'm a pianist; it was easy as cake, actually would be even easier with finger numbers, or represented as notes :)

I can't type G for the life of me. Maybe it has to do with the number of simultaneous keypresses on my keyboard?

is there a standard mapping for chorded keyboards? i feel like X has a much easier combo than E. would be interesting to use data on people's error rate for different key combos and then remap frequently used letters to easier combos.

I found it very hard to do this with my left hand. Especially since the first bit is so widely used and my pinky on that side is pretty weak.

I guess you can tell that I'm not an emacs user :)

I spent a happy year with a MicroWriter chorded keyboard in the early 90s. My right hand still knows the letters, so there must be something in it.

Why is it lefty?