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Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

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Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#211

Post by voldacar »

bckr wrote: post #198
voldacar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so we need better keyboards then. If a character is annoying to type, that is a keyboard problem, not a language or charset problem. So let's improve the keyboard. Currently we are stuck with the garbage qwerty keyboard (and various slightly better permutations of it) which doesn't even let you type all of ascii. Computers should just do what humans want. If you see a character, you should just be able to type…

> If you see a character, you should just be able to type it. How should we do this? I am imagining that we have a "char-bank" that lives on a little touch display at the left of my keyboard. I can add chars to my bank by highlighting them and pressing a 'yank' key. I can scroll up and down through my charbank and type the chars with a tap or rearrange them with touch-and-hold similarly to apps on a phone's homepage.…

Some other people in this thread suggested having a keyboard with little e-ink displays on the keycaps. Then the character map could be completely user-defined. Then you could just have a big bank of keys off to the side to select your desired set of characters, i.e. greek, math, emoji etc. You can already sort of do this in software, but you have to manually remember the location of every character in each extra mapping. But with displays on the keycaps, you could have as many different mappings as you want. And that's how you would be able to type in a sane world

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#213

Post by ta988 »

slx26 wrote: post #143

>> For some reason computer people are so conservative [...] Well, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of imagination might be... keyboards . If keyboard keys were small e-ink displays, easily configurable and accessible by programs, programmers would have come up with a lot of interesting stuff already. We do it with function icons in regular interfaces. If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely…

If keyboards were only usable like that, we would have a problem of accessibility of the technology even worse than what it currently is.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#214

Post by ta988 »

creata wrote: post #195
bradrn wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely take advantage of it. From my own personal experience this is extremely true. A while back I made myself a custom keyboard [0] which can enter lots of characters, mostly for linguistic tasks. I didn’t intend to start using it for things outside linguistics, but before long I was using it everywhere — and my inventory of available characters expanded correspondi…

For anyone on Vim, you can insert lots of special characters by hitting Ctrl+K: =3 is ≡, -> is →, l* is λ, M- is —, etc. You can also run :dig! to see a list of all digraphs, and :help digraph for information on how to define your own.

And for those on emacs, you can change the input method. The one I use the most is the Tex one. so I can type \sum and things like that that gets translated to unicode immediately.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#215

Post by moomin »

Most people who think they see ASCII dependence are actually perceiving standard keyboard dependence. Modern keyboards all ape the Model-M and all modern programming languages are constrained by Model-M compatibility. ASCII is an implementation detail. Very few “radical ideas” for programming language formats pass the “easier to use than typing” test, let alone the “so much easier it might merit jumping off path dependence” test.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#216

Post by adkadskhj »

voldacar wrote: post #211
bckr wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you see a character, you should just be able to type it. How should we do this? I am imagining that we have a "char-bank" that lives on a little touch display at the left of my keyboard. I can add chars to my bank by highlighting them and pressing a 'yank' key. I can scroll up and down through my charbank and type the chars with a tap or rearrange them with touch-and-hold similarly to apps on a phone's homepage.…

Some other people in this thread suggested having a keyboard with little e-ink displays on the keycaps. Then the character map could be completely user-defined. Then you could just have a big bank of keys off to the side to select your desired set of characters, i.e. greek, math, emoji etc. You can already sort of do this in software, but you have to manually remember the location of every character in each extra map…

Well damn. I don't have a dog in this fight but boy oh boy do i want that keyboard now. The possibilities of every key being changed to match context sounds awesome. Especially since i love modal editors with visible prompts.

Vim/Kakoune users could have their help menu _be_ the keyboard. Every action changes all of your keys to whatever is possible. Sort of mind blowing.

Come to think of it, i bet someone has done this with Vim & LED Keycaps. Huh

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#217

Post by cmcaine »

nightfly wrote: post #4

If I wanna use something like a ™ I have to google how to enter it, or just google and copy the character. I don't want any extra glyphs in my code until it's just as easy to enter (at close to full speed) as the glyphs I already have access to.

Julia REPLs and editor plugins have adopted a nice feature where you can type the LaTeX name of the symbol you want to get it.

e.g. `\subseteq` followed by tab yields `⊆` or `\trademark` for `™`.

You can also do emoji with `\:eyes:` for ``

I think this is very practical and if you read code in Julia you can see that it's led to quite a lot of unicode and emoji in source code.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#218

Post by chewxy »

slx26 wrote: post #143

>> For some reason computer people are so conservative [...] Well, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of imagination might be... keyboards . If keyboard keys were small e-ink displays, easily configurable and accessible by programs, programmers would have come up with a lot of interesting stuff already. We do it with function icons in regular interfaces. If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely…

> If keyboard keys were small e-ink displays, easily configurable and accessible by programs, programmers would have come up with a lot of interesting stuff already.

I have a QMK based keyboard. The most interesting thing I did was to have an APL layer on my keyboard. I wouldn't say it's "a lot of interesting stuff"

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#219

Post by astrange »

quantified wrote: post #160
leephillips wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I guess that’s a reasonable use of the word “special”. Here is what I was trying to get at: I can not effectively use my computer for anything without customizing the keyboard a little. I need to make the capslock key into an extra control key. I need to set up a compose key so I can type accents when writing in Spanish (even if I didn’t do that, what about writing people's names?). Even sticking with English, I…

This thread is making the point that the issue isn’t the character set, but rather the keyboards. We’re probably locked in, there is so much inertia around the standard QWERTY with a few arrows and Esc. Maybe an integrated system builder with large scale like Apple could shift things slightly.

CJK users are pretty successful at entering large numbers of Unicode characters with a QWERTY keyboard, and there's more of them than you.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#220

Post by [deleted] »

lucsky wrote: post #148
nsajko wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. You're just throwing insults around (again in this comment), without even letting HN readers know what are you referring to. Why do you think Rob Pike is an arrogant prick, or insufferable? Also note that HN has guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Why do you think Rob Pike is an arrogant prick, or insufferable? Well alright then. How about when he called syntax highlighting "juvenile spitzensparkenblinkelichtzen for kids"? How is that not condescending to pretty much 99% of his peers? And again, how about when he said that the Go language has been designed to allow poor dumb Google engineers to not shoot themselves in the foot with languages for adults like…

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