PseudoKeyboardDoc.tioga
Copyright Ó 1990, 1992 by Xerox Corporation. All rights reserved.
Created by Christian Jacobi, June 4, 1990 1:13:32 pm PDT
Christian Jacobi, March 26, 1992 5:43 pm PST
PseudoKeyboard
An experiment in keyboard less input. Useful for ParcPad, Lifeboard; in its current state mainly to gain experience. This program demonstrates some options on how input can be done without having a keyboard.
FEEDBACK REQUIRED
How to operate:
Start the program by typing PseudoKeyboard into a commander. Sorry, you need the keyboard unless you start it from your user profile.
The program creates a picture of a keyboard. Poking the keys with mouse buttons will write those keys into the feedback area. Left mouse button does lower keys; middle button does upper keys. There are different options on how to handle the feedback area.
Cut mode options:
explicite: Keys are only entered into feedback area. Use the cut button to move feedback area contents into X cut buffer.
automatic: Keys are entered into feedback area and X cut buffer directly; use of cut command is not necessary.
Pasting into an xterm: Use xterm's paste (middle mouse). Note that the text in the cut buffer might be terminated with an "lf"; in this case the command will be directly executed when pasted.
direct: Keys are entered into feedback area and forwarded directly into the application which has the input focus. This can work only with a click to type window manager. (So the input focus makes sense while buttoning the pseudo keyboard). This does (currently) not work for all applications. Many applications ignore keyboard-events sent by other clients. Some few other applications have problems with click to type mode.
Issues
The user interface is really not yet very comfortable. I don't really know how much of this is necessary for mouse driven keyboards, and, how much is due to poor implementation.
Should play with selections instead of cut buffer.
Notice the ugly bug in Cedar: Paste cut buffer into a commander puts stuff to the left of caret!
There should be a keyboard less way of pasting the cut buffer in Cedar.
Thoughts
I guess there are 3 kind of applications.
1) New applications which are written with knowledge of keyboard-less-ness.
2) Old applications which do work using a keyboard and use a keyboard surrogate.
3) New applications which actively support keyboard and keyboard-less input.
Probably this program serves only the class of old applications...?
On the other side, this might be a base thing to plug in before handwriting recognition really is ready.
Experiances
At first it looked urgent to reduce keystrokes. I was intriged to make the cut command automatic, then, fake input directly into the application. However, those improvements did not improve the feel by lot. The problem seems to lie in the fact that the operators view focus has to switch from the pseudo keyboard into the application and back. If that proves true, it won't even help to invent a keyboard layout which allows faster finding of keys. This experiance might directly apply to handwriting recognition.