Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org> wrote:
> Probably a good way to introduce it today is to make it part of a 
> videogame interface and just let the kids learn it (or some equally 
> efficient new way to rapidly navigate, command and type).

Heh.  Actually, Quake works like this, for experienced people, and
people really do learn it!

When Quake players are chatting to each other, they use keyboard only. 
(and they do chat!  The game is both a MUD and a shooter.)  The keyboard
works well because they are entering lots of text.

When they run around shooting each other, the experienced guys use the
mouse in one hand to aim with, and the keyboard for everything else. 
This is a good tradeoff: you really want to use the mouse for aiming
your gun (point and click!), but there are far too many other commands
to put them all on mouse buttons efficiently.   Thus all these other
commands are put on the keyboard.


For extra fun, all of this stuff is configurable, and many players
fiddle a lot with the basic layout.  I will barely resist boring you
with my favorite scheme -- you can all imagine the possibilities. 
August Dvorak would have had a ball.

I don't think a chorded keyboard would fit well into this scheme directly,
because there are only 10-15 commands and plus you don't want to take
your fingers off the movement keys for very long.  But the point is,
the "kids" are indeed happy to learn unusual interfaces if it will help
them win the game more often.


-Lex