Being disgraphic, I'd probably be quite a challenge to any such system, and
on top of it (and probably as a result), I dislike writing.

So that's probably not the best solution for me, though it might be better than
mouse and keyboard.

Alan Kay wrote:

> Daniel --
>
> Long ago, Doug Engelbart came up with both a theory for such interaction,
> and a particular instance of the theory.
>
> The theory was that you should be able to stay at either the keyboard or
> the pointing device for long periods of time without having to switch very
> often.
>
> His instance of the theory was to have a five finger "chord" keyboard for
> the nonmouse hand. This plus two of the three buttons on the mouse allowed
> 127 characters to be typed, which included both text and commands. (The
> other mouse button was "command accept".) So one typically would have
> "hands out" on the mouse and chord keyboard for most navigation, commands,
> correction of typos, and short text inputs. When it came time to type a
> whole paragraph, the hands would come into the keyboard. I got fluent at
> this in the late sixties, and liked it. The PARC Alto came with the chord
> keyboards, but they didn't catch on.
>
> In the early Dynabook design, Engelbart's idea was adapted to a pen-based
> interface. RAND had done GRAIL, a really great pen-based system with a
> recognizer similar in spirit to and better than Grafitti. We realized from
> experience with Engelbart that even a perfect recognizer (which GRAIL
> almost was) was still too slow for some interactions, so I put a keyboard
> on the Dynabook model. Again the scheme was to navigate, give commands, fix
> typos, and do short text inputs with the pen, and then to switch to the
> keyboard for intensive text entry.
>
> This scheme was argued for the Newton and rejected (not on logical grounds).
>
> Now, it happens that there is a GRAIL-type character recognizer lurking in
> Squeak that I did in the earliest days for fun and to provide some
> benchmarks. It is trainable, etc. We plan to put this back in operation by
> January, but you might have fun playing with it now. It is called Class
> CharRecog. The code is very short and should be clear.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
>
> ---------
>
> At 10:32 AM -0000 11/7/98, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
> >I'm a keyboard type of person, and I generally don't like the mouse at
> >all,
> >but I hate switching between them even more.
> >
> >Using Smalltalk, and Squeak specifically, requires almost constant use
> >of the mouse.
> >
> >Does anyone here have any experience with things like Twiddlers or such?
> >
> >The idea of a device that combines the mouse and keyboard into one
> >device,
> >not requiring the annoying context switch, sounds great in theory. Any
> >"but"s?
> >
> >As it is now I simply use one hand for most typing, one hand constantly
> >on the
> >mouse, occaisonally abandoning the mouse when on a real coding roll.
> >
> >I'd be interested to hear how others play.