
Twiddler 3 chording keyboard now available - jff
http://www.tekgear.com/twiddler3.html
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tunesmith
Can anyone weight in on personal experience and if you felt wrist strain? As a
pianist, I think the emphasis on finger-movement chording is misguided. Yes
you can play chords on the piano but the entire point is to minimize finger
movement - send as much movement as possible to the hand, wrist, forearm, arm,
and body so as to minimize local movement. The reason is because if you try to
do everything with your fingers, you increase your odds of getting tendonitis.
Using a device that is designed to localize movement just to the fingers -
through chording no less - strikes me as completely backwards ergonomically.

I see the benefit for those that already have movement limitation, but not
really otherwise.

~~~
tenfingers
Around ~6 years ago I was intrigued by the idea of using a regular midi
keyboard as an input device. I was having some RSI issues, and was looking for
alternatives. I'm not a professional pianist, but I play both pianos and
keyboards. Any regular midi keyboard doesn't have key shadowing issues, so
it's very easy to implement chording mechanics. I remember I was only vaguely
aware of stenotyping, and certainly didn't know about plover back then, so I
just tried some random approaches.

The first issue with chording keyboards is the tradeoff you make between the
amount of keys in a chord required to perform all permutations readily
available in a typing keyboard. You can, optimally, pack all permutations only
using ~10 keys, but you might require to perform either 6 key chords (3 keys
per hand simultaneously), introduce sequences, or introduce trigger delays.

Now, while doable, doing a 6-key chord was quite hard for me. I couldn't
remember all the required permutations, and it also required to setup some
quantization in order to detect the chords correctly. Quantization in turns
imposes an upper-bound on CPM you can attain.

Using more space with smaller chords (a larger set of 2 octaves with ~3-4 keys
per chord) was easier for me, but the regularity imposed by the chords
(jamming the required keys at the same time) was still unnatural.

I tried to setup some different mechanics, using a sort of tree dictionary
where the keys enters the branches. An approach that worked well was to map
the frequent character tuples in adjacent keys. Performing CDE, CDF, DEF, EDC
combos would result the vowels, which were mapped repeatedly at other
locations using the same musical intervals. Typing with this system felt much
more "music style": infrequent letters were mapped sparsely on the keyboard,
with vowels available in every octave. You could move left-to-right to type.
It's also much easier to press keys in _fast_ sequence than trying to perform
a perfect chord timing, or at least that was my impression. I didn't need any
quantization this way.

Still, for anything but text (ie, programming), a regular keyboard felt so
much faster. I remember attaining ~30 wpm or so before giving up entirely.

I wish I had investigated some chord/phonetic based system, but I'm not sure
how much that could've helped with regular programming.

~~~
whoisterencelee
I developed a software demo (for single hand chording on the keyboard) that
updates the character tree representation, possible outputs are shown as the
chord sequence is formed. And the adjacent keys idea you have which I call
"bigram rollover" works really well in this type of system, because you can
tell what neighboring characters are.

The "bigram rollover" is key to reducing the number of key events, and the
added bonus is that it should help ramp up the steep learning curve with
getting the right sequence.

I am also investigating some sort of phonetic/bigram mapping system (maybe
similar to the plover/stenotype system), seems it's the way to go, as
shorthand seems to solve the main issue with chording which is high number of
key events for a single output.

I am actually looking for help designing the mapping as explained above, it
seems we have very similar ideas, perhaps we can collaborate?

~~~
tenfingers
I tried many keyboards due to RSI but in the end I'm currently _very_ happy
with a kinesis advantage, which made me lose a lot of interest in chording
keyboards.

In the end, there's nothing in stenotyping that you couldn't do with a regular
keyboard. The advantage in stenotyping is not chording per-se (which is used
to reduce the number of keys more than anything else), but the
input/composition method, which is _highly_ specialized for text (and english
text at that).

There's no convenient way to compose arbitrary symbols in a stenotyping
machine. In a regular keyboard there are just more keys and thus the
requirement for key composition is almost zero (you still "chord" with
shift/control/alt if you think about it). More keys = more immediate symbols.
On my S90, which is a full-length keyboard, I only have 88 keys with a key
travel length of 1.2m! By comparison, I have (more than) 104 keys in 40x20cm
right now.

~~~
whoisterencelee
I agree, stenotype's advantage is not chording and I think our insight is
similar; it's the phonetic shorthand which is breaking a word down into
syllables which is always shorter than the number of characters (for English
anyways).

I think of it as a readily available syllable->word database, which any
chording mechanism can take advantage of.

You're right, arbitrary symbols is not stenotype's strength, but chording is
somewhat, at least when number of key switches is limited and the whole
keyboard size is really small.

I suppose the question is whether chording in a confined space is any better
than a full size keyboard, because there is zero or less wrist movement and
fingers do not need to reach out (no positional issues).

The answer to that question is yes, chording is better in a setting like
mobile phones, which by the way is where we do most of our typing these days,
so you shouldn't lose interest.

------
ggreer
The site seems to be down (edit: it's back up), but
[http://twiddler.tekgear.com/](http://twiddler.tekgear.com/) is up. If that
dies, here's a direct link to the video on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG3SPSzWUv4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG3SPSzWUv4)

I spent a few months learning to type with various layouts on the Twiddler 2,
but never approached my keyboard speed. Also, the joystick was inaccurate and
slow. A clickable trackball in the same position would be so much better.

I think one-handed chording keyboards could be very useful in some niches, but
they're a waste of time for most of us.

~~~
jff
I'm hoping the Twiddler will provide some variation from regular typing to
help keep my hands/arms/wrists more comfortable.

I'm also very interested in experimenting with wearable computing... I've
built my own chording keyboards in the past for projects, but was trying to do
it cheap/quick so the enclosure and buttons were not easy to use.

