I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table.
In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date.
Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about David Bowie's last album and ∞ to talk about actual non-finite entities.
I olny found out recently that Ctrl+Shift+u and then type unicode hexadecimal outputs these in Ubuntu, presumably all Linuxen. AltGr+8 is great for diaeresis while we're at it so you can go all hëävÿ mëtäl really easily.
edit: black heart and star are not making it through, why Lord, why?!
On OS X, if you type Command+Control+Space, it brings up a character insertion menu where you can search by character name. I can get both daggers, black star and black heart quite quickly that way.
Another really handy thing is the Compose key. If you're using GNOME it's under Keyboard Settings, under Shortcuts / Typing. I have it set to Right Alt. The idea is there's just a whole bunch of memorable key sequences for various common Unicode characters. For example, Alt + o + o = °; < + 3 = black heart, < + " = “, etc. It doesn't have all of the ones you like, but it's helpful :)
I usually map my insert key to compose -- I never use 'insert' for the default functionality, but I also don't type funny characters often enough to justify getting rid of an alt or control key.
I love reading about how different people map different things. For me, it would be a disaster to map insert since I use that for pasting (shift+insert--I'm a lefty and it's a bad habit I grew attached to years ago).
My choice for Compose is the right Windows key, which I think I eventually settled on because I use the left one in some keybinds (winkey+s for shell, etc.) and like you, I couldn't part with an alt or ctrl. I've often wondered what other folks tend to use.
To the grandparent: I'm sometimes amused by what Compose defines. There's ∞ (compose + 8 + 8), (compose + # + #), and oddly (compose + C + C + C + P). I think it may depend on system configuration, but I believe libX11 is responsible. (On my system, Arch, the key combinations appear to be documented under /usr/share/doc/libX11/i18n/compose for my locale.)
That Ctrl+Shift+u hint is nice. Now I can type all the time I want without having to browse for the emoji page to copy it.
And it sucks that I have to use so much that I know the code point for it (1F4A9) off the top of my head. :-(
Edit: I'm definitely putting in U+1F4A9 (the PILE OF POO character), but apparently hacker news strips it out. I'm guessing it's filtering everything that has a symbol character class?
Yes! The Ctrl+Shift+u hint is nice. I can't believe I only just learnt it. How many _years_ have I been Googling unicode characters for? I am ashamed to think.
A few months ago, I had the idea to remake the old Space Cadet keyboard. One change was to make the bucky bits (e.g. control, alt, meta, super, etc.) allow you to type unicode characters instead of APL characters. Other than that and having lower case parentheses (not needing to use shift to type ( or ) ), the keyboard would be like any other mechanical keyboard.
Did you follow through on it? I have wanted a modern space cadet keyboard for a long time, but the current trend in keyboards seems to be to have less keys, not more (a trend that just doesn't make much sense to me).
I think I came up with the idea about 6 months ago. It is on the back burner until I can find a way to mount the switches (Cherry MX Blues (had enough of those lying around)) [0] without resorting to a PCB. Any ideas on that front are welcome.
Regarding the number of buttons, the Space Cadet had 100 buttons and no number-pad [1], whereas most modern keyboards have 104 buttons. I suppose I could add a number-pad to my design (117 buttons), but then I could also use that area for extra user-definable buttons (20 buttons in a 4x5 grid -> 120 buttons). The Space Cadet is a bit larger than most IBM-style keyboards, so more keys means more real-estate; this is not to mention yet further divergence in design from the original Space Cadet keyboard.
Beyond hardware issues, there are software issues to resolve, like whether to include the macro functionality of the original. I can't find any documentation on how it worked, so I get to start from fresh.
[0] = I really wanted to use some hall-effect switches, but nobody makes them anymore, because they are allegedly the most luxurious switches ever. I would probably have to tear apart an original Space Cadet keyboard to get some. Thus, I would probably just use Cherry MX switches
[1] = https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Sp...
That's slightly ambiguous. Is your definition of a "modern space cadet" keyboard that it has more modifier types? Or that it has more keys? (Bear in mind that one could go back to a 101-key U.S. PC/AT keyboard and still have more keys than the 100-key space cadet keyboard.)
For keyboards with more keys (and yet no vendor-defined private HID usages), one can look at the keyboards available in Brazil. Some of the "multimidia" keyboards from the likes of Multilaser, C3 Tech, and Leadership have the 107-key Windows ABNT2 physical layout, with anywhere up to 20 further multimedia keys.
But these keyboards don't have keys engraved with more modifier types beyond the usual five.
I am referring to a keyboard with a multitude of extra keys. The layout doesn't have to be exactly like the original space cadet keyboard of course, but having some 50 extra keys surrounding the normal qwerty portion, as well as some 10 modifier keys is basically what I'm looking for.
As someone who programs in modern APL (no joke check out dyalog) I think this is terrible. Besides the APL characters are just the greek characters, and all sorts of things use those.
The original keyboard design was meant to be used to type the characters present in the APL code page [0]. My intention was that one would still be able to type the same (or perhaps mostly the same) characters as the original keyboard but using Unicode instead the APL encoding (which is based on EBCDIC, yuck).
My design may or may not contain the same keys, because I am not sure how many would want the original APL character set.
APL keyboards are available, so the market exists [1], but that doesn't mean much. I plan to have the micro-controller user-configurable and replaceable, so one could change what symbols were type-able with the same keyboard. As I expect to use UTF-8, this keyboard could be used to type any character in the UTF-8 code pages.
> In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date.
I wrote a virtual terminal subsystem a while ago. I gave it keyboard layouts with the ISO 9995-3 common secondary group. No daggers, alas. But ISO 9995-3 does have pretty much all of the combining diacritical marks. <Group2> <Level3>+D05 is combining diaeresis. In practice I find myself not appreciating that as much as I appreciate being able to type U+00A7 as <Group2> <Level2>+C02.
I have an Alfred workflow that fuzzy-searches through all unicode characters by name and inserts the character when selected. All it takes is a good interface to make it fluid.
XCompose is your friend: black hear suit is Compose-< 3, and with additional configuration[1] dagger can be Compose-| -, double dagger Compose-| = and black star Compose-S S.
In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date.
Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about David Bowie's last album and ∞ to talk about actual non-finite entities.
I olny found out recently that Ctrl+Shift+u and then type unicode hexadecimal outputs these in Ubuntu, presumably all Linuxen. AltGr+8 is great for diaeresis while we're at it so you can go all hëävÿ mëtäl really easily.
edit: black heart and star are not making it through, why Lord, why?!