A different kind of keyboard (2021) | Hacker News Reader

A different kind of keyboard (2021)

ianthehenry.com

134 pointskblissett41 comments

When he wrote 'arpeggiator', I was thinking this was going to go in another direction- holding down a single key that starts at a letter and then releasing the key as it reaches the letter you want. Because when I think an arpeggiator on a synthesizer, it's done via holding a key while notes repeat.

I always was very good at texting on a number-pad phone, via repeated presses- pressing (4) two times for a "H", pressing (3) two times for an "E", pressing (5) three times for an "L", etc etc. I was so used to this that I didn't even progress to using T9 texting before blackberrys and smartphones took over.

So I thought... taking that idea, and doing a press-and-hold while letters scroll by, could be pretty fast. And you could dial up the repeat rate until you started making mistakes. Map 8 keys for letters, one key for a space bar and long-press for extras, one key for backspace and long press for extras, and I think you'd be able to hit much more than 10 w.p.m. that the author winds up hitting.

Only problem: this can't be instantiated as a normal USB compliant keyboard and allow you to see the letters scrolling as you hold, without a specialty keyboard app for the phone.

> When he wrote 'arpeggiator’

Note that the text only mentions arpeggio[1], not arpeggiator[2].

> when I think an arpeggiator on a synthesizer

Playing an arpeggio[1] on a guitar or a piano means hitting the keys or plucking the strings in a quick succession - just like entering key combinations on this keyboard.

And yes, an arpeggiator keyboard sounds like an interesting concept too.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpeggio

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Arpeggiators

I've thought that something like this would be good for inputing text with controllers. with an onscreen keyboard moving your thumbsticks around seems like it would be faster in the long run than trying to use an onscreen qwerty keyboard.

This app is not exactly your idea but it is along the same lines. You "drive" towards the letter you want by shifting your finger. It is the most interesting text input I've ever seen and have always thought it would be cool with some sort of joystick input.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dasher-mobile/id1304772617

Edit: this link has a video: https://acecentre.org.uk/project/dasher-for-ios/

Ha! That’s me! If anyone wants to help dasher dev please get in touch. We need $$$ or some good c coders willing to spend a couple of months working on it all. It’s good. It’s the fastest text interface for eyegaze, head mouse or “continuous gesture”. We need it desperately for those who can’t speak

Woah, nice! I am definitely not a c coder, but I'm a UX designer. I've thought this project was cool for years and would be interested in helping out if my skills are ever of any use.

Oooh yes. Yes. Let’s chat. We have some ux stuff done by a googler focusing on the config etc. people are desperate to do the zooming bit - I’ve try to hold back the tide until we can do the basics but I’d love some help tying up the designs on the overall app. wwade @ acecentre.org.uk

Great, sent you an email

This is one of the many[1] reminders that a lot of people want a smartphone with a hardware keyboard.

Personally I have a small bluetooth mechanical keyboard, it saved me a couple of times when I wanted to do heavy text editing and only had a smartphone with me.

I would welcome another option - small like this one - for casual texting and gaming.

[1]: 900+ votes for a keyboard case here earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38871987

The traditional tiny keyboard is optimized for ease of onboarding, but it sucks to actually type on with any speed. The thing posted has a steeper learning curve, but can be used to type quickly and without even having to glance at the actual keyboard. You can keep it at the back of your phone, or in the pocket of your coat, or have it mounted on the handlebars of your bike. (Actually you can have all three, connecting via Bluetooth.)

AFAIK this is the kind of keyboard military pilots use to quickly type things; you don't have room for a QWERTY keyboard in a jet fighter cockpit.

What I badly miss on the example layout is navigation and manipulation keys. Semicolon + D and semicolon + K have ample room to put there left and right arrows, ctrl + left and right arrows (word navigation), home, end. Somewhere else should be select mode (maybe while holding A), so that the arrows had the shift modifier (selecting) and copy and paste commands (sending ctrl+C and ctrl+V).

OTOH navigation and editing is a separate enough activity to warrant traditional layer switching aka modal editing.

Morse code beats all of these. Steepest learning curve, but fastest entry. At one point I remember people talking about modifying dumb phones (pre iPhone era) to have the ability to enter Morse code via a hardware button on the side of the phone.

The world would be such a different place if Morse code was taught in schools alongside other basics we learn.

If all you care about is typing a stream of letters and numbers, this is indeed so.

But I very often need editing things, moving text around, selecting, altering words, copying and pasting. I need upper case and lower case, fancy punctuation characters, etc.

Not that a proper Morse code mode can't be invented for that: vi gives us an example of such an interface, based entirely on letters and mode-switching.

BTW Morse code is relatively slow to enter by fingers alone, the muscles are too weak for the mass. A proper entry key is fast because it uses muscles of the entire arm.

Nonsense. The Morse code world record is 75.6wpm. People with chording keyboards (even one-handed) do double or triple that easily.

The only portable keyboard that I enjoyed using is the Think Outside keyboard [1]. It is a great compromise between portability and usability. But a lot of shortcuts are not working on moderne devices. It even works as a stand for the phone. But it uses 2 AAA batteries. I wonder if it would be possible to flash it to work with modern devices or even better, customize it.

[1] https://jsyang.ca/hardware/think-outside-bluetooth-folding-k...

There's been some similar setup examples on the ergomobilecomputers subreddit - never indexed phone-specific setups but here's a rough search: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/search/?q=phone...

Theres currently a design contest for a pocket keyboard: https://chrischrislolo.github.io/orthoLabLogs/pocket-keyboar...

I think the concept of not wanting to use touch keyboards on a smartphone is wildy more popular than actually wanting a hardware keyboard on your smartphone. I.e. 900 upvotes is probably more to say people dislike where they have to settle more than many liking the idea (and practice) of actually changing their choice of compromises. It'd be so frickin' convenient but, at the same time, so is basically any other concept that would take up a ton more of your pocket/hand space.

On that front I'm surprised Clicks doesn't have any options at all to have it double as an extra external battery. The size of the external battery case market is probably 50x+ the volume of the external keyboard market and that'd be a pretty unique differentiator in that segment. It's even something they responded to in their FAQ.

The general point could be "people value modularity".

The phone keyboard doesn't need to be baked in, if it can come into action fast enough for the use case. It would be the same for tablets, where being able to switch between a lighter screen only mode and a heavier keyboard+trackpad setup is a big advantage.

Even laptops would fit that niche in a different way, where docking to a full input+output setup is an option.

I don't have the links handy now to make an effortpost, but there seem to be more than a handful of open source (and not only?) projects for such keyboards. Not all with 8 keys, but chording and one hand is the focus.

You can work with something like this with a numpad, there are a few QMK numpads out there now, I believe the cheapest is ~50-60$.

Now, for one-handed keyboards: they are all super expensive, but intriguing stuff, for sure. Of the top of my head: Mattias half-keyboard, Tipy, the good old Maltron, some odd keyboard in a normal format, but with a circular layout that I don't remember the name of, and Frogpad (or something) that seems to have a dodgy fame, if it is still being sold at all. I believe these are all the commercial ones.

On custom keyboards, again, some split keyboards have a controller on both halves of the keyboard, so you can use them standalone. You can go to town and make your own layout there.

Although I am doing some research on that these days(-ish), I have no links handy because I am not interested in chording, and the commercial ones are expensive. And I am sloppy, and I remember some stuff...

Edit: QMK has some "one-handed mode" thingy nowadays, I have not looked into it at all.

Author's entry on Delaunay triangulation is pretty rad :

https://ianthehenry.com/posts/delaunay/

I love the idea of a compact corded keyboard.

In practice, they seem like a recipe for sudden onset of RSI.

Remap Carl-B as the tmux hotkey and do it single handedly — permanent RSI (trigger finger) in two weeks!

I use a Bluetooth http://artsey.io keyboard at least once a week, and I think the chording combos make a lot more sense than these (or I’ve simply grown used to them): https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/08/08/1230

Back when iPhone jailbreaks were common, I installed a morse code keyboard, the whole keyboard had just two buttons. Dit on the left, dah on the right. My motivation for doing so was being able to type out a message with my phone in my pocket or otherwise not looking at the screen.

This looks like a much more realistic way to achieve the same goal. Interesting, if it wasn't so large I might even be tempted to try it out.

Look up 2-key macro programmable keyboards, and maybe replacing the switches with low-profile ones, and you're good to go.

Something like https://www.tindie.com/products/anavi/anavi-macro-pad-2/

Google keyboard for iOS has a morse option

This reminds me of a story I read about pre-iphone where a morse code operator was faster than a text message https://www.engadget.com/2005-05-06-morse-code-trumps-sms-in...

love seeing this resurface, am working on something similar myself -- it'll be like running Taipo on the Fulcrum, with influence from Ikcelaks "Word Builder" serial-steno system (in case anyone wants terms to research :p)

i'll try to polish a write-up when i finish, but really need to focus on finishing first >u<

Why not to split keyboard into 2 pieces and place it on the back of the smartphone in order to make possible touchtyping with 8 fingers?

Your fingers are doing double-duty pushing buttons and yet also holding the phone/keyboard combo without pushing buttons. Even this design has that problem to some extent and it's got a lot more room to hold the phone.

6 fingers might work. I'm holding my phone in landscape here with my thumb and pinky. I've got three fingers in the back on each side I could use. I think I could just about get two layers of buttons in for each finger without too much discomfort, but my ring fingers aren't too happy about shifting down to try to reach a fourth there. (And while every other aspect of the skillset has long since decayed, I did play piano for many years and I still retain those basic muscle skills; if mine are complaining there's a lot of people who straight up won't be able to do it.)

12 still leaves you with chording or arpeggiating or something very, very non-standard, though.

I don't think you could hold it like that for very long. Just in the time it took me to type out my brief experiences on my real physical keyboard afterwards my pinkies are already tingling just a touch. Not a good sign.

An interesting experiment to see if the back of the phone is useful for anything, though. Certainly worth some more thought and experimentation. Phones would be so much more useful if they had something like keyboard speeds available in our pockets.

I believe there is an accessibility setting for the visually impaired that puts a 4x2 grid of pressable squares on the phone screen, and users flip their phone and use it in portrait mode. This might be iPhone only? I remember in the video for this that iPhone accessibility was much better.

Here is a six key braille keyboard for a smartphone. https://www.boundlessat.com/Blindness/Braille-Displays/Hable...

Discussed at the time:

A different kind of keyboard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28611632 - Sept 2021 (147 comments)

Wow home row plus space with A being a modifier and " RETURN plus ENTER, TAB, CAPLOCK/CTRL, and SHIFT might actually be amazing with a typical US layout keyboard with numpad. ESC could be A;

In case it isn’t already on your radar: https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods

Would love to see a video of them typing on it at 10wpm! That's seems decent for a phone.

I think that smartphones with full keyboard and auto complete/autocorrect get you faster than 10wpm. Even the old number pad phones would beat that in the hands of your average 90s teenager.

At least I know keyboard mistakes are my own fault. Smartphone “corrections” have a 30% chance of altering the intention of my words.

(Amusingly, typing this on my phone, Apple corrected “mistakes are my own” to “mistakes are not”)

I have a iPhone 13 Mini and generally just smash all over the place. I turned auto correct off and spell check on, because that seemed like the best method for me to just mash through my sentence and manually select the autocorrect/spell check option I want.

That doesn't sound decent to me, haven't measured but I'm sure I can swipe a lot faster than that on a phone.

Er, what? Without even trying hard I get (according to the typing.com 1 minute test) 58 wpm on my phone - and that's without using swiping or autocompletion.

People could hit that speed on old numberpad based phones. On any decently modern smartphone with swipe IME enabled it's pretty trivial to hit 30-40 WPM.

I honestly love the part about how the author did the key layout.

No hiding behind statistics or any sort of structured process, just doing what feels right, avoiding what feels wrong and iterating.

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