Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

I see lots of people commenting that this sort of keyboard is a gimmick because it's a waste of time to look at keys while you type. As a programmer, I get that logic. But there are times when I would 100% love a keyboard that could allow me to use different key layouts and visually see the layout. The first use-case for me is when switching language layouts. I'm tri-lingual and use different keyboard layouts to be able to type characters in other languages. But every time I switch languages, I forget where the punctuation and other symbol keys have moved to. It's a pain in the ass to have to switch layouts just because I can't remember where a question mark or a curly bracket is in the language I'm using. Second, occasionally do design and video editing on the side. Not often enough to memorize keyboard shortcuts like I do with programming. But especially with video editing, if you're not using keyboard shortcuts and hunting through menus instead, the work is extremely slowed down. Lastly, games. I game from time to time, but each game I play has different controls mapped to the keyboard. I can't usually remember more than 4 or 5 controls for the duration of a gaming session, so being able to see what's what would make my gaming experience much more enjoyable.

All that being said, I'm not holding my breath for this keyboard. The design isn't polished enough, I doubt software support for my use cases will be common any time soon, and I just don't see hundreds of little screens being cost effective or reliable hardware. I hope I'm wrong though.

Plus I can totally see plenty of applications for it:

- fn keys that show what mode you are in. I never know if I'm going to hit F3 or "sound up".

- locking keys: is uppercase is locked or not? Am I at one press for ` ? Have I triggered ^ ?

- show special char combinations: press alt-gr, and the keyboard show you the signs like €, ¤ or | that you can enter.

- per app shortcut displays: imagine, you click ctrl + and all other keys change to show what they can do.

- game shortcuts: when you launch it wasd become arrows, shift become jump, etc

This is what the Macbook touchbar is for (with, granted, no tactility). And, to put it mildly, it divides opinion. I really miss my muscle memory for media keys on my mac.

The problem of the touchbar is that it has no tactile feeling and literally no allowance for muscle memory. It lets you see what mode your in, but it also requires that you look at it.

The Macbook touchbar is a good concept. The implementation is terrible

You should keep the tactile feedback, and the default keys, only enhance on that.

Well, exactly—this is what Apple was going for with the touchbar, except that Apple neglected to complete the circle. Apple expected users to give up tactility in exchange for contextual information; in reality, most laptop users were unhappy with the trade.

This keyboard does both.

If the touchbar had the same haptic feedback the trackpad has, it'd be awesome.

When people are told the trackpad doesn't move when it's pressed - that it isn't "clicking" in the sense you are not pressing a switch - the first reaction is incredulity.

I think people on HN miss the "divides opinion" bit.

I love the touchbar. I love that well-written apps put shortcuts straight in the touchbar so I don't have to discover what function key does what.

I wouldn't give it up at all.

Having a 15" and a 16" (work and personal), I can tell you it's night and day on the 16" with a physical esc key and good keyboard. I haven't once wanted to hurl the 16" into the sea :)

I hate the touchbar. I am a professional programmer and need all the keys I can get. The touchbar removed a number of keys that I used with Emacs, and in return I get little tiny picture that I have to look at before using. Right now the Touch Bar is mostly showing the three words that my Mac thinks I might be typing next based on the prefix that I've already typed. Really? Does it think that after typing D followed by o as I start this sentence that I want to look at the touchbar to see it's guesses and then press 'Does' to save typing the e key followed by the s key. Its a totally stupid feature on a keyboard for people that know how to type.

i wonder if it has more utility if the suggestions were restricted to words longer than, say, 6 letters, where spelling confusion might slow down typing enough to make the tradeoff?

I have always wished Apple would have simply replaced the top row of keys with addressable and configurable LCD or eInk keycaps. Maybe even combine the rightmost 3-4 keys into a smaller slideable touchbar.

With the 2019 refresh I thought they might do that as a compromise.

We could have all had whatever keys we want. Revolutionary. Instead, nope.

Don't know which module they are using, but you won't get partial refresh timers faster than 0.3 seconds, and full refresh timers faster than 2 seconds.

I'm one of the Founders at Sonder. We found from our test units that uses can work up to 30% faster with dynamic keyboards and had strong responses particularly from developers. The company, the intellectual property and some of the key talent was acquired by Foxconn, the current design is quite polished, as is the user interface. In regards to the cost point, it's one large display is a magnet mechanism operating within the periphery. This greatly reduced the unit cost and complexity of the design so it was scalable and comparable in price to an existing laptop keyboard module (when supply chain costs and keyboard layout revenue factored in).

Totally agree. I’m used to typing Hebrew and lately Arabic blindly on a USA keyboard but sometimes I get stuck and it helps to have a quick look. Problem is I’m mostly in Emacs and with its very own inputs it’s not going to help much, unless it’s programmable...

This. I want to write texts on a German keyboard and code on an American one. I've put "alt gr" on caps lock, which kinda makes the pain of 3rd layer curly braces bearable, but every time I reinstall my machine I need to figure out where to set this up. 80% of the time I get the wrong angle bracket. Custom layout keyboard could also keep Z and Y in either place.

A Russian company launched a similar keyboard like 10 years ago, don't know what the long term reliability was

As a programmer, I'd like a keyboard with "λ" and "→" keys beside the usual qwerty keys.

Enable the Compose key, then it's just Compose - > for →.

I don't know lambda offhand, but it's possible to define extra mappings if it isn't there by default.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

but the rules constantly change and at least sometimes require root access - painful when you do that upgrade and now you can't type

They're defined in ~/.XCompose (plus some system defaults), so they never change.

You can just launch on screen keyboard or search for an image of your keyboard layout. The shortcuts info would be a bit more useful but the keyboard needs to support it on the first place

You should 100% have a look at text-expansion tools e.g. espanso with https://hub.espanso.org/packages/french-accents/.

The general idea is that you would type something like :e' to type out é. This allows you to use a single keyboard layout across languages.

which is helpful if the three languages are russian, english and japanese

You are right, this method only works for specific set of languages, e.g same family languages.

There is the Optimus Maximus from 2008

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