Mathpad: A mathematical keypad for students and professionals

Am eagerly anticipating the commercial availability of Mathpad.

At the moment I'm using Espanso, an open source software that lets users map typed character sequences to unicode. So it's possible to set things up in such a way that typing the character sequence ";" "a" ";" makes Espanso replace the entire ;a; string with the greek symbol alpha α.

Symbols like ⇒ that can kind of be "drawn" with common keyboard characters "=" ">" is possibly nice to be mapped to the character sequence ;=>; This is a personal preference inspired by Typst's math notation design choice.

Interesting idea! Though since it doesn't have a more ergonomic keypad-like layout, but repeats the slanted mistake of default keyboards, and requires software companion, what's the advantage over adding math layers to your current keyboard, where you also have access to more keys and modifiers?

I have rofimoji[0] bound to a key chord in i3wm and configured it in such a way that it allows me to enter not just the usual emojis but also common math symbols. Works like a charm!

[0]: https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji

it is frustrating that nowhere does it tell how it actually works. generally keyboards can not send specific unicode codepoints to host system, they only send scancodes that get interpreted by operating systems keymap. But most keymaps do not define any keys for these symbols, so there is something going on here. Based on the docs, I'll guess it attempts to send a sequence of keypresses to trigger some compose mode (thus requiring additional software on windows). I find such hacks slightly frustrating because they are so fragile, they depend on the keyboard predicting perfectly how the host will handle the keypress sequences which obviously can break quite easily, e.g. simply by switching layouts or having some timing/focus related aspects.

I would really love to see new keyboard HID designed specifically for modern advanced keyboards (qmk etc) where you wouldn't need to resort on this kind of trickery. Or alternatively make the input stacks of OSs more easily configurable with custom physical layouts and modifiers etc instead of assuming that all keyboards follow basic ISO/ANSI layout.

Interesting idea, but back when I needed to enter such I use DEC's compose.exe (while it still worked) and then Allchars:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/allchars/

or used a stylus and the drawing input in TeXview.app on my NeXT Cube or https://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html --- since then, didn't Microsoft's Journal and various other stylus note-taking apps get math support?

These days I just press the touch keyboard icon in the task bar and use that to get special characters.

A further concern is one has to be entering things more than just as a lineal stream --- superscripts and subscripts need to be entered into, things need to be put over or under a fraction bar, &c. --- do the hard-wired buttons actually accelerate things that much?

Why not just use a programmable keypad such as a Streamdeck?

Prior art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

I'd pay money for one of these, if it had the keys which I want, which this one doesn't. I think the trick would be to somehow make it customizable, but I'm not sure the best way to do that. Parametrized PCB design? 3d printing?

I'm not quite sure, but my dream would be smaller buttons, coarsely modelled on the HP48-style keypad. I can't imagine many people share that dream, but I've wanted to make that for a long, long time.

Coincidentally, you get a long ways there by simple adding a Greek keyboard layout. You hit meta-space, and ασδζχψ. meta-space, and back to normal.

Foreign-language keyboard under GNU/Linux also have a layer with many convenient math keys (²·≈·¾ all exist natively in my normal layout).

A smaller win for me would be to simply print all of that on my keycaps.

For those interested in purchase rather than DIY, the above page links to:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/summa-cogni/mathpad

I use qwerty-fr [0] for this. It's pretty nice, since it works on all three major OSes and is basically a few compose layers on top of a US base layout. I use it to type greek letters, swedish vowels, italian accents and math symbols. A couple of non-breaking spaces are also there. It's the only layout I use nowadays.

[0]: https://qwerty-fr.org/

I bought a 25 key pad that is collecting dust. Not worth it for me to have an extra keyboard taking up space on my desk, may as well use LaTeX or alt codes

Not bad, curious about price, but as noted by others in thread, the only really special thing are the keycaps, given those you could replicate functionality on any ZMK/QMK keyboard. I might try this as a layer of a glove 80 or ZSA voyager, s.t. like that

As a red-green colorblind person, I find it hard to distinguish the colors of the R and C keys

This is super cool. When I was doing a lot of math-related typesetting I found that I got really fast with Emacs + AuCTeX. I have no idea of the state of that project, but if you were fast you go at nearly the speed at which you could write.

Briefly there was an IPv6 numpad: it had 0-9 and A-F on it for typing "Hex"

Love this idea, although I wonder if this can also be done with QMK keyboards. I'll have to try setting up similar macros in my Ergodox EZ.

It looks nice, but I'm not sure I'd jump ship from my snippets setup I have with vim. At the end of the day it would be very similar to a mouse hand movement and would probably take a long time to get it as quick and comfortable as just typing "aa" for alpha when I'm in math mode which I get into with "mk"

Y’all should try espanso for your latex needs.

Why no Aleph?!

This is pretty cool!