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shae

We're also limited and shaped by keyboards. Why only one letter per finger? The datahand does five!

Why are key switches only press?

What about analog partial key press? There are Hall effect keyboard switches that do that, I want to try some.

What about finger twist for input? I don't think anything exists? Would that be a volume knob on a key switch?

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> What about analog partial key press? There are Hall effect keyboard switches that do that, I want to try some.

That sounds fun, now I really want to try out a keyboard where half press is lowercase and full press is UPPERCASE! No more pinky strain from shift presses.

Some pipe organs have keyboards that support that. I can't figure out when it started, but my guess is the 1920s. No hall effect, they had mechanical contacts. (I've never got to play one and always wondered if you could feel when the two positions were hit or if you had to guess and rely on sound - organ pipes often have a long delays between when you press the key and when the speak)

A simple solution that would work on any keyboard (but will be much easier to do on a keyboard that supports custom layout and layers, e.g Ergodox) would be to send small letter of key is pressed under 0.5s (to be tested what value feels best) and capitalized if over this value. After a while it might feel natural to press quickly for a small letter and slightly longer for capitalized

The ZSA firmware fork of QMK does this! I don't have it enabled on my moonlander, but many of my friends do.

This is true. We’ve been so formatted by big keyboard that I never considered just the tip of my fingers. I hope you’ll make good use of our opposable thumbs in this new keyboard paradigm

I agree. I blew out my left arm for a year from too much typing, so I switched to kinesis style keyboards so I could put modifier keys under my thumbs. I dunno if your suggestion was meant to be serious, but it's still great.

It wasn’t, but the reason I like to explore absurd looking ideas is because of the serendipity that lateral thinking opens up. Thanks for exploring that!

What would be a cool use case for thumb controls here? Is this something you could do with those gamer keypads?

I was pressing control and alt and shift with my pinky fingers, and that's how I blew out my arm.

I switched to a Kinesis Advantage keyboard and now I have control, alt, hyper, super, backspace, and shift under my left thumb. My right thumb has control, alt, hyper, super, enter, and space.

I don't know anything about gamer keypads, is there one you suggest I investigate?

I’d start with this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaming_keypad

The CharaChorder [1] is one attempt to give a completely different shape to input methods

[1] : https://www.charachorder.com

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