In Praise of Chorded Input

The older I get, the less I like key chording. This is particularly exacerbated by the lack of a common key chording scheme between Windows, Linux, and OSX. It becomes a mental stutter as I have to constantly override my muscle memory. It's probably why I like VIM editor schemes so much - there's significantly less chording required.

I've also noticed the preference come up when playing games. Ideally, I would simply assign additional abilities to modified keys, but for the life of me, it's just simpler to assign them, one to one, to keys on the keyboard. My hand needs to move around the keyboard a bit more, but it has to contort a lot less.

Also, it's somewhat telling that some the fastest typists in the world don't use shift - they use caps lock.

ref. http://www.seanwrona.com/typing.php the final paragraph

> Chorded input is rare these days - the movement of software to touchscreen devices argues against it.

Multitouch gestures are a form of chorded input, no? And one we’ve greatly under-explored, IMHO.

Probably mostly because people tend to be using either touchscreens that are mobile, or touch pads that are rather small, and so you can only fit one hand’s worth of fingers on the digitizer, and one hand’s fingers can’t (without training) do too many different things at the same time. So mostly we come up with gestures that move some or all the fingers of the hand in concert.

But if you had a digitizer surface that had room for two hands, you could do a lot with that. Moving a finger of one hand in a circle while the other swipes toward/away from it; “unfolding” something by interlacing eight fingers in a line and sliding them to opposite ends of the digitizer; etc.

(I think Apple could easily introduce these for people who own both an iPad and a Mac. It seems their Sidecar support is already moving toward this, as it sends native touchpad input to apps—acting, in est, as a large Bluetooth multitouch digitizer—rather than just doing HLE emulation + transmission of the particular gestures possible in macOS currently.)

And sure, that all sounds a bit mystery-meat at first—no clear affordances. But it’s not any more mystery-meat than voice navigation is. Voice navigation is a “grammar” on top of regular spoken-language words; you expect the user to learn language at some point. Similarly, a “vocabulary” of multitouch gestures could all be taught to the user at some point—even practiced in an OS-shipped program resembling a typing tutor. (Back when mice first became prominent, OSes shipped with mouse-requiring games specifically to serve as mousing tutors!) Then you just have to teach the users visual/symbolic mnemonics for these gestures; and then you can use those symbols as accelerator indicators in your regular menus and label text.

(Oh, and don’t get me started on what’s possible with a depth-of-field sensing camera, ala Windows Hello. I’m constantly surprised that competition isn’t already heating up to be the first OS to natively support American Sign Language watched-gesture input.)

> But it's not just music software: pretty much all the joys I've listed can be used to explain people getting so into learning Vim or Emacs.

Eh, the reason why I'm into modal editing is precisely that it doesn't require much chording. That's also why I've configured my keyboard to write all the ascii printable symbols without chording, and shift is sticky so I don't need to chord it to write a capital I.

I could imagine having a handful of simple chords, but not much more. The problem I see with chording is that it imposes timing restrictions that allow room for misinterpretation when you're typing things too quickly. And generally I find it more difficult & tense to press more than one key simultaneously.

I've been searching relentlessly for a qwerty chording solution that works for me. I was hoping to find something useful here, but there's only a couple of Wikipedia links that I've already scoured through. QMK firmware seems like a good solution, but it's only available on DIY mechanical keyboards or expensive ergonomic keyboards. There are a few hacks out there for other keyboards, but I don't want to brick my daily driver.

If anybody has a solution for custom chords on a qwerty that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars I'd love to hear it!

I picked up this half keyboard for $30 at an embedded conference in Boston probably 15 years ago. It's amazing how quickly your brain 'gets' it and your typing speed ramps up: https://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/

I'm guessing at some point they got approved as an assistance device, because now they sell for $500. Presumably it's insurance companies that are paying at this rate.

I wonder if the advent of VR/AR will eventually result in some form of chorded keyboard input gaining widespread popularity. AR/VR devices are often used in situations where you don't have access to a physical keyboard, and some standalone VR headsets already feature early forms of hand tracking which could trivially allow for simple chorded input once they are a bit more refined.

Its possible people will just get used to typing on simulated virtual keyboards, like they did for on-screen keyboards on mobile. However, simulated QWERTY input in VR is significantly worse than it is on mobile, since unlike on mobile there's no tactile feedback at all; not even the rudimentary feedback of your fingers touching a flat surface. Whether that added inconvenience is enough to overcome the friction of users needing to learn a whole new input method to type with though is uncertain. In the short term I don't think it is, but long term? Hard to say.

I used a BAT (http://xahlee.info/kbd/bat_keyboard.html) long ago for enough time that I was able to type _prose_ at about 50wpm. For that use, it was quite decent - especially if you were using some system that required a lot of mousing and didn't have good keyboard control options. There, having one hand always on the mouse while the other could provide input was faster and less frustrating than current keyboard+mouse. What was not at all good was programming. Symbols often require modifier keys; but on a chorded keyboard like the BAT, that meant two chords for each symbol: the chord to set the modifier, and the chord to choose the actual key that goes with the modifier.

Still, I think there's a lot of room for improvement of human interfaces (at least until we hopefully someday get neural interfaces which bypass hands and even eyes).

I think chorded input is good, and I dislike touch screens. I also thought of using Hollerith chording for entering text using a numeric keypad (although a separate key will be needed for a space), rather than what most things use for entering text using a numeric keypad, which is worse, I think.

People are still building chorded input devices. This was shown at CES:

https://www.charachorder.com/

Mobile devices lack good input methods. There’s a possibility they might prove useful for those on the go.

Plan 9's acme editor uses mouse chords: select text with the left mouse button, then while holding LMB click the middle mouse button to cut. Click and hold LMB to select an input point, then right-click to paste the text from the clipboard. To copy text, you simply select with LMB, click MMB to cut, then immediately click RMB to paste back into the same spot while also maintaining the clipboard copy.

I use it daily and it is pretty convenient. There are other chords too, but those are the big ones.

Of course lots of musical instruments require chorded inputs. Pianos, guitars, trumpets, most woodwinds, even trombones.

I can add to this praise. I have been using key-chord-mode in emacs for the last 7 years. Love it.

We need foot pedals for Dvorak/QWERTY switching _in charwise situ_ … virtuosos of the finger arts, please stand up. And modes, obvi prose v code.

asking important question, can wha-wha be incorporated? Markdown, are you there?

Many keyboards support NKRO today, so it should be possible to have chords defined. for little used keys (some people don't use numpad much for example) it could be very interesting.

Emacs users will agree. Indeed I am 100% convinced that being an Emacs user enabled me to pick up the piano and be better at it than I was the last time I played 20 years ago.