The Keyboard You Really Don’t Need Or Want

I think I would probably not deal well with something that requied a specific timing, even though I’m a musician. Also, I have to point out that while computers have been interpreting Morse for a long time, they’ve been notoriously POOR at doing so, especially when the sender isn’t particularly consistent in their timing.

My approach to a Morse-inspired keyboard was to use two buttons for each finger, with the “dits” being the home row and the “dahs” being the row above. If used with the right hand, the fingers would represent the order of the dits and dahs, left-to-right, while on the left hand, still left-to-right, but right-justified. In this way, the length of the character is easy to determine. As with standard Morse code, the most-used characters are the easiest to key. I might just end up doing a two-key keyboad in the style of a Morse paddle, one key for dits, the other for dahs. But this WOULD have to rely on a time delay to detect the end of the character.

My main reason for even wanting a chorded keyboard was so that I could have my left hand on a keyboard and right hand on a pointing device at all times. This goes back to bad experiences with many different applications. For example, those where you have to select a point on the screen by moving the mouse to that point, then clicking the mouse button, where clicking the mouse often moves the mouse in the process, slowing the process down and increasing errors significantly. This has always been troublesome, I’ve handled it in my own applications y using keyboard shortcuts limited to left-hand keys. Sometimes it works well, other times not so much, but the point is that it decouples precision positioning from triggering an action.

Way, way back in time, I worked with a schematic and chip layout system that used a Summagraphics 4-button digitizer, which used a felt-bottomed puck that had enough friction that it didn’t move unless you wanted it to. This system also had mostly-left-handed keyboard shortcuts, and formed my expectations for how well combined graphics and text entry COULD work. When the mouse was introduced and rapidly replaced the tablet, that was a dark time for me.

I tried exploring the possibilities for this (the Morse-chord™ keyboard) using a standard keyboard, just detecting when keys were pressed and released. Boy, was I in for a surprise. Long, long ago (again), you could detect keypresses directly in C. But with modern OSs, and I mean Windows AND Mac OS AND Linux, this is no longer an option. I had to program using a GUI system (SDL2) to get this level of control, and even then, Mac OS had the audacity to pop up a dialog asking me if I wanted to grant permission for my application to read the keyboard. For and APPLICATION to READ the KEYBOARD. This is why I want to make an 80s-style computer out of a couple of Rasperry Pi Picos. Shit’s getting out of hand.

Sorry for the multi-level rant – we were talking about keyboards, weren’t we?

The April 1971 issue of QST had a chord keyboard for CW. Five keys, when you combine them you get the characters. I didn’t really look at the choices, but one key sends “a” but obviously with other keys, sends other characters.

Done with RTL logic, the concept could be updated, or done with a microcontroller.

I never saw the scheme again, so perhaps there’s good reasons against it.

Iambic keyers of course send dots on one side, dashes on the other, but both alternating if you squeeze both. I wonder if that’s good enough that a chord CW keyboard doesn’t give much improvement.

When I had a Teletype machine, there was a rhythm to it. A keyer that imposed timing on the sender in some way might be useful.

Or just build a regular chord keyboard, and then a program converting characters to CW.

Iambic keyers take a lot of skill to do well, and compared with chorded keyboards, require multiple strokes per character rather than a single stroke with a given hand shape, so I think chorded is a better way to go. N1FN wrote an interesting article that challenged the supposed advantages of iambic keying (http://www.morsex.com/pubs/iambicmyth.pdf), that showed that the improvement when going from a simple paddle or bug key to a full iambic keyer was miniscule.

I remember using model 33 Teletypes, and yes, by locking out the keyboard until ready for the next keypress, they actually sped up my typing by enforcing that rhythm. Even though the keyboard could do 100 words/minute, I discovered pretty quickly that I would try burst-typing some words faster than that, which was really counterproductive, especially on “glass teletypes” like the Datapoint 3300, which would just skip characters if you typed them too fast.

I like a good rant, well a good well reasoned rant at least, with lots of tangents thrown in as they apply. That reminder that even the simplest thing generally is part of a more complex whole.

Sounds like we have very similar ideas for Morse inspired Chording, so at least we are either both idiots or it is a sound enough idea to be worth trying… Slightly different reasoning though – for me while hands on a pointing device would be nice it was more for the compactness, and feel, a nice quality feel so its nice to use, but small enough to integrate anywhere and free up valuable desk space in general.

For pointing device I was thinking turning the whole small little assembly into an optical mouse and probably adding a trackball/joystick for the thumb.. So you can even operate all of the basic computer HID inputs with just the one hand.

Yeah, I think we’re on the same page in some ways. Basing the chording patterns on Morse was to me a way of reinforcing my Morse fluency. I think if I was writing Hack-a-Day comments using Morse patterns, I would quickly get over those confusions between J and B, for example, and maybe even get numbers and punctuation down solid.

The ultra-compact thing is good sometimes, and I think development of a usable device that’s held in one hand and outputs to earbuds would be very interesting. Just not quite what I think I need. But I would follow it if it was documented on hackaday.io, for example.

Everybody has different needs. Lots of people want full size, full travel mechanical keys, and wouldn’t like what I’m working on, because it has slightly smaller keys (17mm vs. 19mm) and very short travel (less than 1mm). But that’s another project.

I think that if I WAS primarily looking for an ultra-compact device, though, and this could be worth exploring to me at some point, it’s likely I would just go with two buttons – one for dit and one for dah. Maybe not quite as fast as a chorded solution, but Bluetooth that to my phone, and I’ll never tap on a stupid on-screen keyboard again! Or, heck, maybe I could make an alternative on-screen keyboard that’s just two big buttons. Still gotta’ be better than buttons 5mm apart.

Whoops! And now I see it was Programmer-Dude who was doing the earbuds thing. Apologies to both.

Indeed I would hate your keyboard of choice – I find anything that isn’t a Model M or Model F feels bad to use. The shorter key travel can be ok, but its that lack of haptic feedback before bottoming out, and the need most of those extra thin keyboards have of smashing them right to the end stop so it registers – not universal failing of course, some of the IBM thinkpad laptops I’ve experienced have been very nice for laptop keyboards).

With my rather large hands really can’t cope with smaller keys very well (though yours isn’t compact enough I’d really not be able to use it, wouldn’t like it, but it is just big enough. The hopeless area is reserved for some of the 15″ and smaller laptop style keyboards that decide to give users more keys so the keys end up about 3/4 the size of my pudgy finger tips…

Some other decent keyboards out there, some of the modern mechanical keyswitch are nice (maybe even better than the ol’ buckling spring – I wouldn’t know having not tried many of them), but I already have model M’s and F’s why spend a fortune on a new keyboard if my current one will do, and has been working perfectly longer than I have been alive… Though the 122 key terminal keyboard I type this on is one reason my desk is forever somewhat devoid of space, but its a good primary keyboard, strangely a little quieter than the newer model M’s…