Hello,
I'm curious to know if anyone has ever written keyboard drivers to remap
the keys of a typical computer keyboard to something that would be more
accommodating to entry of ABCs. For example, characters that are used most
often can be mapped to keys in the home row, or the row above it.
Let me explain what I mean further. Rather than the typical home row of a
keyboard, asdfghjkl, we could have something like abcd~:efg|, the row above
the home row could be ABCD[]EFG... or something like that. From a quick
glance at a couple of abc tunes, this would seem to put the most commonly
used keys in the most accessible positions on the keyboard (one must admit,
the key for the pipe symbol, |, used for separating measures, is in a
rather awkward position for a key that seems to be used the most often
after the letters used for notes.) These may not be the best options (I
haven't even considered the possibilities available to us by way of the
SHIFT key), that's a different debate, but it is certainly an improvement
over a qwerty layout.
For those who might be concerned about writing up the header of the tune,
where the current system works fine, it is possible to switch between
keyboards by a click or two of the mouse or else by keyboard shortcuts (at
least in the OSs that I've used), so one could easily use a normal layout
for the header, and then switch in less than a second to an abc friendly
layout for the tune section of an abc.
There seems to be a significant contingent of tech savvy types within the
abc using community who work on abc software. I really know nothing about
writing keyboard drivers, but writing a keyboard driver seems to pale in
comparison to writing something that can take a bunch of text and turn it
into a postscript file containing conventional music notation or into a
midi file, or vice versa.
Does anybody here think this is a worthwhile idea? Or am I the only one
who enters abc textwise?
Randy.
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- [abcusers] abcm2ps under Panther Tom Keays
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout Randall J Elzinga
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout Alice Corbin
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout Norman Schmidt
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout John Chambers
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout John Walsh
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout Phil Taylor
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout Jack Campin
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout John Chambers
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout Randall J Elzinga
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout Guido Gonzato
- Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout Thomas Bending