

A Simple Text Editor Foot Pedal - mathiasx
http://blog.mattgauger.com/blog/2013/08/06/a-simple-text-editor-foot-pedal/

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secstate
This is such a cool idea, and the nerd in me loves the alternate input idea.

My problem with this, and it's such a niggly problem that's it may not even be
worth mentioning, is that this will only work when you've got the footpedal
around and I'd be frustrated when I sat down at a computer and didn't have it.

Like the author's note about muscle memory and wanting to hit the ESC key. I'd
be frustrating to get the pedal into muscle memory and then forget it.

Sure you can learn a new system, but it's nice to know that vim is vim,
regardless of the device you're connected via. Same is true for Emacs. Boy, an
ALT key at my foot would spoil me rotten.

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listrophy
Is there a way to send data back to the Teensy? That way you could have a
program on your computer that tells it "hey, I'm in vim now, so use 'i' and
'Ctrl-['" or "hey, I'm in emacs now, so just be 'Left-Alt' now".

If it's "just a keyboard" and doesn't normally support that, I've seen hacks
that utilize the Caps/Scroll/Num lights as inputs back into a keyboard...

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gizmo686
I'm not sure if there is a way to send signals back to the device. But, it
should be trivial to do what you describe on the operating system level.
Ignoring the possibility of specifically looking for that keyboard, you could
just have is send obscure keys that you would never type. Then you can just
re-map them on the OS level whenever you want to.

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tubbzor
Thank you for posting this, it's an awesome project for cheap. It would be
nice to include my feet in my workflow and not just my hands.

It would be cool to implement the pedal as a hot-key reader. Say you press the
pedal down and type 'ff' and let it go and firefox launches, or type 't' and a
terminal opens.

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mathiasx
If you use Alfred/Quicksilver (or your Linux WM's equivalent) you could just
map the pedal to that that key combo.

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listrophy
"One downside I found was that the Ctrl-[ combo seems to back up the cursor
one character, which can be annoying."

So, technically you could just flutter the pedal to move the cursor left? :)

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mathiasx
Yes.

It's not just Ctrl-[ that does this, Escape does it too. We just typically
don't toggle between insert mode / ESC in vim fast enough and enough times to
notice it. With the pedal it's quite easy to press and release it a bunch of
times before you type anything.

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gizmo686
Now that I notice that behavior it is really weird. Anyway, if that is a
problem/annoyance for you, then you could try switching to insert-mode by
using append ('a') instead, which will bump the cursor up a character and
counter ESC bumping you down one.

