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I love Scratch-like programming environments in principle and as an introduction to programming, but dragging blocks with the mouse is tedious. Do has anyone ever tried to design a keyboard-based input scheme that still works in this graphical environment?

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In Snap!, GP and MicroBlocks there's a pretty powerful keyboard interface to assemble blocks. I use it all the time instead of dragging blocks. Check out page 115 of the Snap! reference manual here: https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/help/SnapManual.pdf

Jens Mönig implemented keyboard input for both GP and Snap!, so the same hotkeys will work on both. Since we're using GP for the MicroBlocks GUI, the same will also work on MicroBlocks.

Thanks, that looks exactly like what I was missing! Will try that out sometime soon! In my defense, "page 115 of a pdf file" is not typically indexed by search engines afaik ;)

Yup, totally. Power feature discoverability is not where we shine... :p

I've seen a few attempts at "structure editors" which are keyboard driven but limit what you can type so it's always syntactically correct.

Fructure is an example which looked promising! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA

Very cool stuff, thanks for linking!

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