it was a really, really bad keyboard and it was insanely expensive
perhaps modern e-ink could make a better product, but I think the real reason we don't have keyboards like that is because keyboards are at their best when you aren't looking at them. a good old (and free) cheat-sheet works well because you really only need to keep it out on your desk for about two weeks.
I think e-ink is promising here specifically because you don't have to keep supplying power to the display just to keep an image visible. You could have a separate 'key cap programmer" that would update the display for an individual keycap and that updated display would stick until you reprogram it again.
Next step would be to integrate such a keycap programmer into each switch on a keyboard, so that the keyboard could program all its keycaps in one go without requiring the user to pull the cap / program it / reinsert it.
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On the topic of whether or not you need to look at a keyboard's keys in order to use it: sure, maybe you or I - who are used to touch-typing - might be able to get by on a Das Keyboard or whatever, but ordinary people (that is: people who are not typing enthusiasts ;) ) benefit greatly from having keyboard keys labeled, and especially benefit from having keyboard keys labeled with common shortcuts for whatever applications they're using. This sort of thing could have immediate practical applications in point-of-sale, warehousing, data entry, and everywhere else where people who may or may not be technologically-savvy still need to use computers for their job duties (and sure, we could just declare "well if they use computers for their jobs then tech-savviness should be a job requirement" like the Hacker News elitists we are, but the real world doesn't work that way, nor should it, in my opinion; user-hostility is a design flaw, not a feature).
Really, this would be a high-tech replacement for both 1) custom-printed keys and 2) employees taping hand-written legends to their keys.
For StarCraft 2, just use the grid layout. I don't understand how anyone would want to use anything but the grid layout. It's very easy to learn: not only do the key match with the displayed icons' positions, but the key is labelled in the icon.
I tried grid, but I couldn't ever unlearn the muscle memory of other games. A for attack, S for stop, H for hold position, P for patrol is burned into my hands at this point, trying to overwrite that is fruitless.
I manually made my own grid layout, where Q,W,E,R were the bottom row of buttons, in order, and everything else stayed where it was, mostly. Worked well for all the units I remember, but buildings ended up having a manual grid layout instead.
You end up pressing Q a lot, which was conveniently located near the group keys anyway.
Control of games, especially keyboard control, has long been an interest of mine... Many games go to great length to help the player control the game properly/optimally, yet many games fall short and can be improved by simple AutoHotkey programs, or more complicated xlib programs.
Amusingly, it seems to be half-half, creating interesting results like a digits row 1-7 being: Religion, Continent, Appeal, Settler, Government, Political, Axii Sign.
Also WASD being Great Works, Attack, Move Backwards and Strafe Right.
I'm confused to when this was built. Because the SVG code looks modern, but some of the games are completely dead MMOs (like Earth & Beyond). Seems to be a mix of early 2000s games and then games from the last couple years.
Obviously, back in the day, keyboards were one-size-fits-all...