Leap Technology (1987) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Leap Technology (1987) [video]

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65 pointsgjvc40 comments

As a side note, this made me realize just how underutilized thumbs are when touch typing. Fingers are each responsible for around 4 keys (including the numbers row) while thumbs are each responsible for 0.5 keys (they both are responsible for the same space key). It's unfortunate these additional thumb keys didn't catch on back then.

I'm hoping that someone comes up with a way to use the classic thinkpad-like button layout like on the KT-1255 keyboard [1]

[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41qWiL0JSTL._AC_.jpg

Mine also hit the alt and command/windows keys depending on which they are paired with. That said, despite the opposable thumb's usefulness in grabbing things, it's the least dexterous of the fingers for most people.

That's one of the reasons I switched to an Ergodox. Now both of my thumbs are responsible for 4 different keys and it works really well

> thumbs are each responsible for 0.5 keys

Depends on the person and setup. There's both thumbs for space, that's true.

But then you have a thumb each on left alt and right alt, and they're not redundant because alt is usually pressed in combo with another key so you use both. Then you've also got the windows key, which is one thumb only, and also the printscreen key, or whatever key is in the same position on the other side of the board, for the other thumb.

Just realised the my left thumb is not even hitting any keys. It is left idling.

Did they really form an entire company around a single text editor feature?

90s

On the surface yes, but the reality is that they formed a company around the idea of increasing the productivity of your typists.

The people making the purchasing decisions for IT weren't the people using it, they are looking a the bottom line. If they could convince executives that their technology made their types x% more efficient, they would win the sale over the competitor. Companies were in the process of moving from having typists on typewriters to typists on computers in the mid 80s, purchasing a computer was "purchasing a text editor", that was the whole point of buying one.

No, it's actually a single application OS that accepts plugins, so instead of buying a spreadsheet, you add spreadsheet functions to The Text Editor, you learn one application, and add features to that instead of buying new applications.

Aza talked at length about this when he was working on Enso. The premise is that it’s inefficient from a UI perspective to have an OS with a bunch of silo’d applications that aren’t easily able to share data.

I agree with this and I think it’s an underlying reason why power users are drawn to the terminal or go to great lengths to live in EMACS. They’re drawn to the ubiquitous nature of those UIs over the disjointed desktop experience or the schizophrenic web experience. In fact, in addition to Enso, Aza Raskin worked on a Firefox plugin called Ubiquity.

https://croftnuisk.co.uk/coltsoft-docs/fireworkz/GSGuide/win... is a Wordprocessor/Spreadsheet/Database in one.

https://textease-studio-ct.apponic.com/ is a DTP/WP/Spreadsheet/Database/Drawing/Painting/Slideshow/Movie Editor/Turtle Logo program in one

Neither had the ability for 3rd party plugins though

No, the product was a computer, the Canon Cat[0]. The leap keys were one of its unique features.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

>To avoid a mode, the Canon Cat was designed without a power switch. The reason was that products react to gestures differently, depending on whether they are on or off, and a power switch therefore introduces a mode. To save energy, the Cat went into a low-powered sleep state if it was not used for five minutes. To make sure that sleep was not a mode, any user action or incoming message turned on the Cat without perceptible delay; furthermore, the user action that turned it on was not lost but took effect just as if the machine had not been in the sleep state.

>In many systems, computers come out of sleep mode at the touch of a key, but the keystroke that turns them on—and any keystrokes made subsequently but before the system is fully awake—are lost. Not losing any keystrokes turned out to be an elegant feature. For example, if you had a sudden inspiration or had to take a note during a telephone call, you could just start typing without worrying about the state of the Cat or even looking at the display. It is a characteristic of modelessness that, once you become habituated, you do not have to think or plan before you act; your attention stays on the content of your work.

The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin

I believe the Cat also had (invented?) autosave. From the same book:

>I am not paranoid, just realistic. Yet these elaborate procedures [constant saving and backing up] should be unnecessary. The system should treat all user input as sacred and —to paraphrase Asimov's first law of robotics, "A robot shall not harm a human, or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm" (Asimov 1977, p. 44). The first law of interface design should be: A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

The Cat absolutely has a power switch. "Low Power Mode" isn't as low as you might think. The screen is still active and instead of completely blanking randomly moves the text "Canon Cat" around. That being said... I've never known it to randomly access the disk when the screen is blanked. And I try not to stress the power supply by turning it on and off a lot. I probably only use the thing a couple hours every other / every third day. Surprisingly, I've only had to replace the power supply once.

For those scoffing at this, you might be interested to know that the brains behind this was Jef Raskin, he of the book "The Humane Interface" [0,1] and was responsible for conceiving and starting the Macintosh project. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designi... [2] https://www.mac-history.net/apple-history-2/mac-history/2012...

No. The LEAP Technology was one of the more obvious differences with previous text environments. For me, the more interesting feature of the Cat / Swyft is it loads the environment exactly where you were when you last saved it to disk. Sure, MacOS-X and Chrome do a half-hearted attempt to do the same thing these days, but in 1987 this was a revolutionary idea.

My guess is they focused on the LEAP stuff 'cause you can't make a whole video about booting up to where you last left off.

Other things I like about my Cat:

* Integrated FORTH development environment. * After getting used to the "text / document oriented interface" I kind of like it. I turn my Cat on and just start typing. Later on I figure out where I want to move that text to. * The dual cursor thing makes it easy to figure out what you're going to delete when you press either delete or backspace (one deletes the character in front of the "regular" cursor, the other deletes the character under the "regular" cursor.)

But a few things I don't like:

* I love LEAP, but would also love to have had arrow keys. * Connectivity to my leenucks box is kind of bad. I had to write my own FORTH comms package. * Importing other people's code into your environment is a confusing process of swapping disks and trying to not confuse yourself or your Cat.

And Surprisingly:

* I've had my Cat for decades and I've yet to lose data. Just remember to hit the "Disk" control key before ejecting the floppy and you'll be fine. * Virtually all my floppies still work.

One of the things commenters on this video seem to be missing is they actually did user testing. In the 80s and 90s, Sun and Apple (and Information Appliance, obviously) funded teams of UI researchers to collect hard data on how humans interact with computers. Seems these days you just have some random product manager saying "meh. this looks cool. let's do it that way."

Nah. You run A/B tests on your customers without their knowledge.

Sure. But the A/B tests aren't testing things like "which color combo leads to faster comprehension and response among people with colorblindness" and more like "do we get more money from our customers if we put the sales banner above the corporate logo or below it?" The former situation could be beneficial to the user while the latter is beneficial almost exclusively to the site operator.

Oh wait. You were being snarky. I see it now. Very droll. Yes. Didn't we put a clause in the Terms of Use document saying users agree to be our guinea pigs for various inhumane interface experiments forever!?

There was a neovim plugin named "Leap" mentioned on HN recently that implemented the same type of logic.

Link: https://github.com/ggandor/leap.nvim

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134113

PS: I wish there was a VS Code plugin for this functionality...

You can embed NeoVim within VS Code

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetlia...

I don't actually want to use a vi-like editor, I just want the "leap" functionality, which sounds genuinely useful as a standalone plugin/feature.

Having used both, I don't think you can say it's the same functionality.

Explanation how it works around 3:30. You press (or hold?) the key, and it's basically CTRL-F backwards or forwards (based on which key you press) from your current cursor position.

They didn't have Ctrl+F back then?

BTW this reminds me of Ctrl+R in Bash (reverse search). Try it if you don't know it!

They didn’t. Like many other features we take for granted today, full text search was a challenge in the early days.

You have 64K RAM and the data is on a 360K floppy. Not only is the floppy very slow to deliver data, it takes several seconds to seek to a location. The user data may be in many different formats. How do you search for arbitrary strings interactively, fast enough that it feels like you can just “leap” to the next occurrence?

I think you might be thinking of the Swyft Card, which was an Apple ][ card that implemented a number of similar features before the Cat was released. My Cat has 256k of RAM and uses 800k floppies. However, by default it just copies the RAM straight to disk and doesn't use any more than 256k of the floppy. You CAN access the rest of the disk via FORTH, but it's a PitA and you don't really get a file system as much as a block device.

FWIW, the computer in TFA had 256k each of RAM and ROM, a 256K floppy disk and was running a 5MHz 68k. Fairly beefy for a single-task computer.

If you use Ctrl-R a lot (and even if you don't), I recommend trying out https://github.com/junegunn/fzf, makes it a lot easier to use for me.

Asa Raskin’s Enso and Ubiquity

https://youtu.be/8fRdbC5c37A https://youtu.be/XdB_61ghvZQ

Wow, this is like Vimium, but for any text. Sublime has a plugin for that: https://github.com/ice9js/ace-jump-sublime, thanks for the tip!

I copied the date from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900, but perhaps someone can figure out the actual year of this?

It appears to be correct according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

For me, what would really help in my typing is to improve my accuracy as my most used key is the backspace key. Beside more practice, any hints?

The right kind of practice is going to help the most. One thing you may or may not have tried is practicing with a metronome (if you don't own a metronome, googling "metronome" will pull up google's metronome). Pick a target for accuracy and slow the metronome down until hitting one key per beat with your target accuracy works. Then gradually speed up the metronome, keeping your accuracy at the desired level.

Steve Yegge recommends deleting whole words and retyping instead of using backspace, this might help you. On a Mac Option-Delete will do this.

I needed to check if it was posted on April 1st. Seemed like an old school april fools' joke, like the recent Stack Overflow CtrlC/CtrlV buttons.

It almost looks like a satire video

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