Chorded keyboards

[Walter Stanish]

I recently switched to Wacom tablets instead of mousing and found it
to relieve wrist and finger pain.

Happy with this success I am now looking at QWERTY alternatives and
found a UK manufactured device known as the CyKey (~80GBP) and an
international one known as Twiddler2. The second appears - after STFW
- to be out of stock and of dubious manufacturing quality, so I'm
going to try out the first.

Has anyone used any of these devices before, specifically with Linux?
I am particularly interested in custom chords (a bit like physical
gesture macros) and any experience using these input systems with
vim.

Walter

[Frank Scott]

Post by Walter Stanish
Happy with this success I am now looking at QWERTY alternatives and
found a UK manufactured device known as the CyKey (~80GBP) and an
international one known as Twiddler2. The second appears - after STFW
- to be out of stock and of dubious manufacturing quality, so I'm
going to try out the first.
Has anyone used any of these devices before, specifically with Linux?
I am particularly interested in custom chords (a bit like physical
gesture macros) and any experience using these input systems with
vim.

...

I have a CyKey which is a descendant of the original MicroWriter which
morphed into the Agenda PDA. This had a plastic casing molded to fit the
right hand with long travel microswitched buttons for each finger and
two buttons for your thumb. The original device had a small LCD screen
and minute amount of RAM and was a sort of portable note taker. They
later sold a gutted version with no screen and the electronics replaced
by a resistor network as an input device for the BBC micro and called
it a Quinkey. I had one and it worked fine except the 4 finger and 2
thumb keys didn't give enough combinations to encode the function keys
on the BBC. It was very quick to learn and comfortable to use.

The Cykey uses the same system with the addition of an extra thumb key
to give a full set of keycodes (it actually has a symmetric layout of 9
keys to accommodate left handers, but you only use seven). It is a flat
pad device with chiclet style keys.

I find it a lot harder to use the Cykey than the original MicroWriter.
The original's sculptured shape provides a more restful position for the
hand and gives a good 'home' location. The microswitches are much nicer
than the rubber pads. The CyKey is obviously designed for use with
mobile devices (they specifically mention Palms on their website),
rather than as a keyboard replacement.

I have had no problems using the CyKey with vim, but I'm thinking of
adding another microswitch and an Arduino to my Quinkey and resurrecting
it as a replacement keyboard.

Your hands are probably nimbler than mine, but I suspect that if i used
the CyKey for a lot of input I'd soon develope RSI

fcs

[Nix]

Post by Frank Scott
Your hands are probably nimbler than mine, but I suspect that if i used
the CyKey for a lot of input I'd soon develope RSI

It does look like a mobility thing rather than an RSI-reduction thing to
me. I'd be concerned about one-handed things like this in any case:
they'd naturally double finger loading, and if you're anything like me
your finger loading is high enough when you have two hands to work
with...

[John Winters]

Post by Walter Stanish
I recently switched to Wacom tablets instead of mousing and found it
to relieve wrist and finger pain.
Happy with this success I am now looking at QWERTY alternatives and
found a UK manufactured device known as the CyKey (~80GBP)

Ouch! That looks awfully expensive.

However, I have used a MicroWriter AgendA in the past (it's in the
drawer next to me as I type) and I quite liked it. I found it faster
than handwriting for taking notes, although not as fast as typing on a
full keyboard. Very useful for writing things up on the train on the
way back from a meeting.

John