 I have a new keyboard. Actually, that statement is almost a complete lie. It's not new because I've had this for years and it was extremely second-hand when I got it. And it's not really a keyboard, it's more like half a keyboard. So what this is, is a Razer Nostromo gaming keypad, intended for playing games, particularly first-person shooters. What you get out of it is a relatively ergonomic setup that's supposed to live on the left hand side of your main keyboard with your right hand on the mouse. Your left hand goes on this thing. You get 14 keys in a relatively ergonomic layout, a clicky mouse wheel for changing weapons, a squeezy modifier key, a D-pad, and this thumb button down here. That's fairly hard to reach. I bought this a while back when I was having an RSI scare. Shooting panes in my right hand. And given that nearly everything I do that is either fun or lucrative involves keyboards, I was particularly worried that this might stop me being able to type. So I got this with the idea that it would teach me how to type one-handed. I'd be able to leave the right hand on the mouse, like you do for gaming, and just type on the gaming keypad on the left. Luckily the RSI panes turned out to be completely unrelated muscle stress and went away, but by that time I'd already written the software. So I'm going to talk about this a bit because it's quite interesting. You may notice that this keyboard has rather fewer keys than normal keyboard. So given there's only 14 main buttons, how are you going to type 26 different letters? The answer is combinations of keys. Because I was using this thing as a cording keyboard. The cording keyboards are a very old idea for entering text, where you use rather than a single letter per key, you use combinations. It's a much older idea than you might think. Stenography machines were using this way back in the mid-1800s. Bodo's original Telegraph code was 1874, and it was a five-bit code intended to be entered manually on a keyboard with five keys. One key generates each bit. The idea has never really gone away. Modern stenography machines are still cording, although they are ten key. Doug Engelbart in his epic 1968 user interface demo was intending the user's right hand to be on a mouse and the left hand to be on a piano-style cording keyboard. People try and bring the idea back every now and again in modern forms. They never really gets anywhere. I suspect because the big problem with cording keyboards is they are epically hard to learn, as I will demonstrate later. So I first encountered cording keyboards with the BBC Micro in the 1980s, where there were adverts for the Queen Key, also known as the Microwriter, which was a cording keyboard device for the thing. I think they sold about three. Luckily I never had any pocket money to buy one, so I kind of dodged a bullet there. But it stuck in my mind. So on comes the RSI scare I thought about cording keyboards. Buying a real one is stupidly expensive because the modern ones are incredibly specialist in producing small numbers, but these things are cheap, particularly if you buy them as secondhand as I did. And it's just a USB keyboard. Well, USB keyboard and mouse. So writing some software to turn this into a cording keyboard was really easy. It's only about seven, eight hundred lines of C. And that took me about three days. Sadly, learning how to type on the thing was a rather different matter. But let me plug the thing in and set it up, and I will show you how it works. So here it is all set up, plugged in and ready to go. Sorry about the reflections in the screen. My little laptop has got this incredibly shiny screen, and as a result you have an excellent view of my microphone stand. I hope you enjoy it. So I decided to call my software Narcissus because if Razer called this thing Nostromo because it's full of aliens and will eventually explode, I decided that what you really want when faced with Nostromo is a Narcissus. So here we are. It's a simple C program with about eight hundred lines of code. It took me a few days to write. It is currently running in the background. What it does is it looks specifically for this USB keyboard and then translates the keystrokes into X events. So I can type and stuff shows up. And I can type combinations and stuff shows up. Like so. Now, the interesting bit is learning the chords. So I also wrote a tutor program called Narcheuter. So let's us start that at level one, shall we? So what this is doing is it's telling me that it wants me to learn a single key combination, which is E. In order to type an E, I press button three. Like so. And then I press four and eight for a return. Now the way I set up the combinations and I made the coding pattern myself. It needs some work. I didn't know about Bordeaux code when I made this or I would probably have used that. The way it works is use the same coding combinations on the top row and on the middle row. On the top row, you get lowercase letters. On the middle row, you get uppercase letters. And it is as simple as that. To type in other keys, you use other combinations involving diagonals. You've noticed I'm using four and eight diagonally here for return. Four and ten is backspace. Five and nine is forward space, et cetera. The bottom row is used for additional modifiers. So, for example, to get numbers, I hold down eleven and then I can just type in the normal way. This modifier key here is control. So I can delete that line of text by doing control U, which is two and four. The d-pad is a d-pad. However, if you hold down eleven, then it becomes page up, page down, home, et cetera. The thumb button is unused because it's a reach to get at. Punctuation and so on is done by a whole bunch of really weird combinations involving diagonals. So one and nine gives me an open brace. The opposite, which is six and four, will then give you the corresponding close brace. The problem with these is that learning them is a pain because you very rarely use any of these options. And in hindsight, it would probably have been better not to make courting combinations for the punctuation. Instead, using, I think, multi-key patterns involving ASCII codes would be better. It's just learning chords for the letter keys is bad enough, but learning another 20 or so for the punctuation, which you hardly ever use, ain't fun. What else is there that's interesting? Oh yeah, verticals give you other punctuation, but verticals are very bad because you can't really type them with your hand in place. You've got to rotate your hand sideways to get at them. So that's not brilliant. But let me demonstrate to you actually like typing on the thing, typing letters. So this is telling me two chords, E and T. So T is a four. Our first actual word is T, so T-E-E. E, which apparently is in the word list. We now get to level five. So we've got three chords. I will skip ahead to level 10. And yes, I am typing the commands on the ordinary keyboard because reasons. So here we have 10 different chords. And yeah, so T, S is these two. A and R, trio, T, R, I, O. The return's bad. I picked four and eight. So it's actually this rather awkward movement like that. I should have actually picked three and nine because that's much easier to get at and you type a lot of returns. I think I was expecting you to use four and eight, these two fingers, but I kind of don't. So try, dare, and... So T, R, E, A, D, S. T, R, E, A, D. T, O, R, S. T, O, O, T. H, no. H, I, E, R. You get the idea. T, I, E, D. Move down one, so you get T, I, D, I, N, E, S, S. It will actually fail that because, you know, I should have put a bit of thought in and made it accept both cases, but that demonstrates how capital letters work. T, I, D, I, N, E, S, S. T, I, D, E, S. T, H, R, E, A, T, E, N. So, yeah, that works fine. I find that I've been practicing with this for a while today for this video and I am getting noticeably better at typing on the thing. And you notice that this hand is, like, completely unused. It's just sitting here out of camera range. So it does genuinely work as a single-handed keyboard. You'll also notice that trying to type on it and talk at the same time is not so successful. It is hard to use. But I can totally imagine that with some dedicated practice and, you know, being driven to it by maybe not being able to use one hand, it would be totally successful. The keyboard combinations need work. The letters work okay. The rest of it not so hard. O, O, R, E, S, T. That's the wrong word. Stored like so. So I am totally going to keep this as backup in case I need it. The other thing that might be worth doing is, of course, this is a left-handed keyboard. There's no way you could use your right hand on it. My right hand is more dexterous because I am right-handed. And normally you put your right hand on the mouse. But maybe with this thing, it would be better to have the keyboard under my right hand and the mouse on my left hand. I'm not sure. It would need experimentation. So stored, dent. I'm also not entirely sure of how good it is ergonomically, given this hand is not moving, it's doing lots of up and downs. But it is at least a very different pattern of movement than I normally get with a keyboard. I'm a self-taught programmer typist. So I do touch type, but I don't use any standard scheme. My hands move around the keyboard all the time. I can't use ergonomic keyboards because I tend to type letters on the wrong side of the keyboard with my hands. This does keep my hands moving, which is good strain-wise. And, of course, with this thing, the whole point is you don't get any of it. The software is completely generic. It uses X input APIs to access the keyboard here. This presents itself as a USB keyboard and mouse, the mouse being the scroll wheel. So the Narcissus software will work on any USB, or probably other keyboard. You do need a certain amount of rollover to make the chords work, but it should adapt pretty much anything. And, in fact, having the left side of a normal keyboard under your hand is reasonably comfortable. So it's all open source on GitHub. There's a link in the description below. If anyone's interested, get in touch. Yeah, my typing speed is not great, and this is only level 10. In order to be able to type properly, you've got to go all the way up to level 26 and use all combinations, including the four letter ones. I did think about... Well, of course, I can only go up to five... I can only go up to four different combinations because I only have four fingers at this part of my hand, so I can't press all five. So I ended up with X and J as being the least used keys. And, of course, combinations like these, V and Y, also not brilliant. But I think everything else is a three-letter combo or fewer. So this is a demonstration of my new, not-so-new homemade courting keyboard, except not actually a keyboard at all because it's not a keyboard... R-O-A-S-T-E-R. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're interested, if you've used the courting keyboard before, if you want to use this, post a comment. Let me know what you think. And I think I will just sit here and practice on this thing for a bit. R-O-A-T. Very, very exciting. I will say that working through this word list... I have found some words I've never knew before. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this video. Let me know what you think.