simulating chorded keyboards

[Matt Minuti]

I'd strongly suggest looking at doing a little bit of hardware hacking via
the Arduino Leonardo. It's trivially easy to make it show up as a generic
USB HID keyboard, meaning no fancy driver concerns, no matter the OS.

The keys could either be a handful (heh) of buttons laid out however he
wants, or you could even use a PS/2 keyboard and have the Arduino interpret
the keycodes and send the appropriate keypress signals via USB.

A student of mine once made a Minecraft griefing controller: it basically
had QWEASD, spacebar, shift, and a dedicated spamming button. The buttons
worked as expected, sending keypresses, but the spam button sent the
necessary keypresses to go into "talk" mode, write some nonsense like
"HAHAHA n00b, you can't get me lol!!," and send it to everyone on the
server. I'm sure the possibilites for good are even greater than such
evil... :)

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 2:22 PM, David Rysdam <david at rysdam.org> wrote:

> Remember the MIDI son? This is a different son, Kyle, with a different
> project. He's interested in chorded keyboards. You can find these here
> and there online, but he wants to design his own. To start, he wants to
> simulate one with a regular keyboard.
>
> We've been looking into ways to let him flexibly define keyboard input
> (chords, modifier keys, etc) but without requiring a ton of low-level
> programming.
>
> 1) A simple game engine (pygame, e.g.) that reports "key down" and "key
> up" events rather than simply delivering a pressed key via something
> like read(), getchar(), etc. He needs to get between these events to
> figure out the "current chord". Even pygame is more programming than he
> really wants to do, though.
>
> 2) xkeycaps looks like the opposite of what I want, but it's described
> so poorly I can't tell for sure. It looks like I can generate multiple
> keysyms from a single key press, but not vice versa.
>
> 3) emacs! This was actually my first suggestion, since it does almost
> everything he wants. Of course, he'd have to learn emacs first. However,
> there's another problem that I'm not sure can be overcome. Aren't emacs
> sequences limited such that you can't have one be a prefix of another?
>
> For instance, he'd like to be able to do this:
>
>     'i' key down followed by 'i' key up: 'i'
>     'i' down followed by 'k' down followed by 'i' and 'k' both up: 'm'
>
> but with emacs you can have "i+k" mapped to m but then not 'i' mapped to
> 'i'.
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