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Comment by voldacar | Hacker News Reader

Okay, so we need better keyboards then. If a character is annoying to type, that is a keyboard problem, not a language or charset problem. So let's improve the keyboard. Currently we are stuck with the garbage qwerty keyboard (and various slightly better permutations of it) which doesn't even let you type all of ascii. Computers should just do what humans want. If you see a character, you should just be able to type it. It's absurd that cpus can do billions of ops per second but you can't just type an omega. Absolutely shameful, really.

You should dream bigger. A better world is possible but only if people really want to throw out all the shitty designs from the ancient past

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> If you see a character, you should just be able to type it.

How should we do this?

I am imagining that we have a "char-bank" that lives on a little touch display at the left of my keyboard. I can add chars to my bank by highlighting them and pressing a 'yank' key. I can scroll up and down through my charbank and type the chars with a tap or rearrange them with touch-and-hold similarly to apps on a phone's homepage.

If I want to map a char to my keyboard, I can press and hold a "map" key, tap the char, and press the key I want to map it to. If I want to map the char directly from the screen I highlight it and press the map and yank keys together.

Some other people in this thread suggested having a keyboard with little e-ink displays on the keycaps. Then the character map could be completely user-defined. Then you could just have a big bank of keys off to the side to select your desired set of characters, i.e. greek, math, emoji etc. You can already sort of do this in software, but you have to manually remember the location of every character in each extra mapping. But with displays on the keycaps, you could have as many different mappings as you want. And that's how you would be able to type in a sane world

Well damn. I don't have a dog in this fight but boy oh boy do i want that keyboard now. The possibilities of every key being changed to match context sounds awesome. Especially since i love modal editors with visible prompts.

Vim/Kakoune users could have their help menu _be_ the keyboard. Every action changes all of your keys to whatever is possible. Sort of mind blowing.

Come to think of it, i bet someone has done this with Vim & LED Keycaps. Huh

>Vim/Kakoune users could have their help menu _be_ the keyboard. Every action changes all of your keys to whatever is possible.

Wow, this is an amazing idea. Think of all the other unimagined possibilities if we had real innovation in human-computer interface tech

I remember 14 years ago salivating at the Optimus Maximus keyboard from Art. Lebedev studios: https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/maximus/

You can see IMEs used for Chinese/Japanese. Type in ascii keyboard, then transform to own language characters.

To get there, though, you need everything upgraded. Keyboards, sure, but also compilers and editors and IDEs and static analysis tools and grep and...

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