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Comment by inhumantsar | Hacker News Reader

I'm 100% with you on this but I will admit there was one concept / short run project that actually looked like it was on the right track: The Optimus Maximus keyboard[1].

The keyboard itself was not good for a bunch of reasons, but the idea was gold. Individual, mechanical keys which could change their legends to suit the current context. You wouldn't have to memorize every possible layout before using it, and you could change the layout to suit whatever you're currently doing.

The closest equivalent I've seen would be the pre-mouse-era keyboards which could accept laminated paper legends for specific applications. The next closest, tho in the opposite direction, would be modern configurable keyboards with support for multiple layers layers.

1: https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/maximus/

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There's this great article on the Optimus Maximus, and how it directly lead to the now popular Stream Deck (by Elgato, not the Steam Deck by Valve)

https://www.theverge.com/c/features/24191410/elgato-stream-d...

The fundamental problem with a dynamic layout is that you need to look at it to know what the keys are. The one huge, underrated benefit of a static layout is that it's constant across the environments that you use it in, so it's (always to some degree, rarely perfectly) memorised. Qwerty doubly so, because so many people have it memorised. It avoids the problem with the Maximus that in order to take advantage of the dynamic layout, you really want to be able to see through your fingers. Your fingertips by default block the information you need.

I can see the Maximus being useful for switching between and learning new layouts - so if you want to give colemak a try you can, without needing to swap all your keycaps (even if that's possible on your keyboard), or swapping to blanks and forcing yourself to learn everything by heart. But I think the reason you don't see this idea repeated much is that it's self-defeating.

Do you have to be looking at it? My keyboard has blank keys. I used to use vim, which had a modal input scheme. My music keyboard has modes where different keys play different instruments.

I agree that having the legends are good for affordances when learning. But they oddly hurt training. Specifically, they make it harder to remove the visual from the feedback loop. When training typing a long time ago, you wouldn't even look at the screen til you typed it all.

That's exactly the opposite scenario though: the reason you can get away with having blank keys on a keyboard or a modal input in vim is that the inputs never change, you can commit them to muscle memory and then never consciously think about it. That all gets blown away if the interface is dynamic.

But they do change? Depending on the mode of my editor, they do different things.

There is some stability, but not absolute.

Similarly, if I play a game using me keyboard, which keys control my character will be in contrast to what is displayed on the keyboard.

Now, constant change would be bad. But I'm assuming that isn't what is being proposed?

It is, in the sense that, if there's a way to display a dynamic label on individual keys, some UI/UX designers will make use of that to create interfaces that can't be learned, as they change depending on tasks, environments, and from version to version.

Consider that touchscreen is very much this, and ever since phones got them, you can no longer do anything without looking at the screen. Interfaces are not stable enough to learn (and not reliable enough to operate without looking).

Yeah, on that I will agree it would be a terrible idea. The stream deck should be a good example, though; In that I'm assuming that most people do not have those buttons change much?

Amusingly, I'm now remembering the very old video game system where the different games had cards you slid into the controller to indicate what the different buttons did. Seems like that is the general ideal.

The whole point of the Maximus is that it had little displays on each keycap.

> you really want to be able to see through your fingers

As when graphic artists draw on, and interact with, a tablet, while watching a screen, rather than using a tablet display. Similarly, while I enjoy the feel of a thinkpad keyboard, I do wish it did whole-surface multitouch and stylus and richly dynamic UI as well. So I tried kludging a flop-up overhead keyboard cam, and displaying it raw-ish as a faint screen overlay, depth segregated by offsetting it slightly above the shutter-glasses-3D screen. In limited use (panel didn't like being flickered), I recall it as... sort of tolerable. Punted next steps included seeing if head-motion perspective 3D was sufficient for segregation, and using the optical tracking to synthesize a less annoying overlay. (A ping-pong ball segment lets a stylus glide over keys.)

The flux keyboard seems to be a modern attempt at the same concept. They're taking pre-orders, I don't know if they've shipped any yet or how close they are to shipping.

https://fluxkeyboard.com/

reminds me of:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/09/searching-for-finally-got-m...

and

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/03/cursed-keyboard-image/

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