A Modern Space Cadet | Hacker News Reader

A Modern Space Cadet

stevelosh.com

58 pointsbehnamoh31 comments

One thing about the original space cadet keyboard was that it was a crappy keyboard. It was made of nice cherry switches but the case was plastic and flexed (very) slightly. This need not have been a killer but the PCB was very long (look at all those keys!)* and lacked an appropriate rib to keep it stiff. So it would flex a little.

Now those keycaps were pretty big back in those days (no apple ultra minimal styling) so the displacement wasn't enough to mess up touch typing. But regardless, it was enough to make the keyboard feel slightly spongy, which was a shame as the key mechanism was really good.

Also the keyboard was too wide, (you had to take your hands off the keyboard to press some keys, like KTV (really an excellent keyboard BTW) holdovers such as ⊕ or new ones like . So in practice they weren't used so much.

This keyboard was only used on the CADR; later Symbolics and LMI keyboards still had a lot of keys, but were comparatively stripped down and more stable mechanical engineering.

* even bigger than the weird keyboards that have a pointless numeric keypad next to them that you still see sometimes these days.

The Space Cadet did not use Cherry switches. It was made by Micro-Switch and thus used Honeywell's hall effect switches. The switches are very highly regarded and presumably very nice to use if you're into linear keyfeel. Some later LISP machine keyboards used Hi-Tek space invaders if I'm not mistaken.

It seems a little unfair to call the board crappy. A lot of keyboards had a little bit of flex to them. Most modern keyboards (even premium ones) still flex a little bit. There were better -- or at least more solid-feeling -- keyboards around at the time, some of them more common and cheaper, but calling a Honeywell board "crappy" is just downright hyperbole.

The KTV keyboards were steel and didn't flex at all, so were a pleasure to type on. Perhaps I should have said "a bit crappy". I typed a lot on them for years.

The hack to force you to use the correct shift key when touch typing is amazing! I can’t wait to try it. I have been plagued with using the wrong key for years.

https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#s16...

This made me think: After you train yourself to always use the correct shift button, you could remap the "wrong" one (e.g. the left shift button + "A" on a querty keyboard) to something else.

Anyone here doing this? If so: what are the downsides to this approach?

The downside is that you would be touch-typing incorrectly? Assuming that you would intend to use that mapping.

Presumably you would not be using it as frequently as the 'right' mapping, i.e. it's mapped to some not super-common but useful editor function in a similar manner to ctrl-, alt-, or meta- would be. Such mappings do not generally need to be optimised for speed or ergonomics as much as keys used for entering the text itself (and indeed using the 'wrong' shift key could still be faster or more ergonomic than using any of the other modifiers, depending on your layout).

Check out monkeytype.com it's a fantastic typing speed/accuracy test with a plethora of config options, including an option to require opposite shift key.

i got 70 on my first try on my crappy laptop keyboard (dell latitude e7440) but i suppose on a better keyboard i might get better results. still, that is kinda nice

I thought this was going to be about pinball.

I wish it was too.

Aside from Psycho Pinball that was my favourite PC pinball game...

This is what I need to do in my life, customize my work area.

I’ve been moving around for so long, using a laptop for the most part working from beds and coffee shops…

I recently got a desktop for the first time in decades and love the experience and do more focused work.

Thanks for the inspiration to customize my environment.

I sometimes have the opportunity to work from home but wasn't doing very often since we had just moved and I hadn't bothered to setup my desk. I'd either sit on the couch or in bed typing on my laptop. Eventually we got our office set up and I put together my desk. Now, I actually have some motivation to work on stuff at home since I've got a proper chair, keyboard and large monitors. Its much more comfortable and I actually look forward to coming home early to finish out the work day.

> My dream would be to get a custom keycap set with my key labels and the Space Cadet colors/typography that would fit on a white Realforce.

After the blog was written in 2012, replica Space Cadet keycap sets for Cherry MX became available in 2013.

Realforce RGB models that fit those were released in late 2016, but I don't think that there was every any white Realforce RGB model.

I know of two modern attempts to recreate the Space Cadet keyboard.

https://keymacs.com/

https://kono.store/products/input-club-symbolic-keyboard

Every time I see that Apple keyboard, I can't help but be reminded of the chicklet keyboards of the 8-bit era. Everything old is new again.

One of the programs is needed only because caps lock was rebound at the OS level. But Karabiner Elements can do the control or escape trick without that remapping.

I do the window switching with Hammerspoon and a prefix key: after typing alt-space Hammerspoon will show a modal overlay summarizing the available keys: w for web browser, t for e-mail client, space for terminal.

I’ve tried using AutoHotkey to replicate space cadet shift on windows to no avail (very unresponsive). Does anyone know a way to get it working?

I used EmacsEverywhere with ahk. It generally works great. Sometimes while an holding down ctr-f (or b) it sticks in an f (or b) instead of moving the curiosity forward (or back). I'm pretty happy with it though.

(Don't hate me. Years of Emacs usage is hard to overcome. I even made Emacs bindings for Davinci Resolve...)

There used to be a keyboard called Optimizr produced by a company called Matias: https://matias.ca/optimizer/

It hardware-mapped the CapsLock key to be a modifier for a bunch of other things, basically allowing your right hand never to have to move off the home row.

It's been discontinued but I managed to re-do a lot of the functionality in software using (a somewhat older version of) AutoHotkey: https://github.com/jasonincanada/dot-files/blob/master/optim...

There's one there for dvorak too of course

> very unresponsive

AutoHotkey seems to operate at a pretty high level in Windows' input processing stuff. There are lower-level APIs and tools available, but which behaviors are you trying to replicate?

All I really want is to have each shift bound to parentheses on tap. This was exceptionally easy to do in Mac (Karabiner) but seems halfway to impossible on Windows.

AHK has usually worked for me in the past for rebindings, but this problem in particular seems to be too much for it.

What tools have you tried? Have you tried SharpKeys? IIRC I've used it in the past - not for your scenario though - and it worked well. Plus it's on GitHub.

I’ve read this article before. As far as I remember he didn’t create a software configuration for a Space Cadet keyboard. His setup isn’t full-featured enough.

I wonder what the opposite of this would be. A piano keyboard with seven keys that you use to type ASCII? Two telegraph keys which represent high and low?

Yes, that would be Douglas Engelbart’s “Keyset” from 1965:

“In addition to inventing the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart and his research team at SRI adapted a five-key "keyset" for typing and entering commands with the left hand while pointing and clicking with the mouse. Reminiscent of equipment used by telegraph operators and stenographers, Engelbart was among the first circa 1965 to use a keyset with a computer, and definitely first to use on a display workstation in concert with a mouse or other pointing device to seamlessly and efficiently navigate the information space, without taking your eyes off the screen. Much like driving a car, you steer, press the pedals, and even shift gears without taking your eyes off the road.”

“By pressing down the various keys on the keyset like keys on a piano – one at a time or in various combinations – you could type all the letters of the alphabet. In addition, they programmed the buttons on the mouse to work like shift keys and command keys for the keyset. So for example, pressing the middle mouse button while typing on the keyset produced uppercase letters, while pressing the left-most mouse button produced numbers and punctuation instead of letters. Other mouse buttons served as command or ctrl key. Thus with mouse and keyset working together, you could enter the equivalent of every key on the keyboard.”

https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/273/

These are known as "chorded" keyboards, and for most people are more of an esoteric curiosity than a practical tool, with the exception of stenographers and their special steno keyboards.

(2012)

This details how to allow for single “modifier + key” combo for opening apps instead of alt-tabbing.

That sounds pretty awesome actually!

Ah, to be young again

There are a bunch of developers who review keyboards on youtube, so this was rather disappointing.

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