Norman Schmidt writes: | You certainly are not the only person who enters abc textwise! | | After some experience with an excellent music program (Lime) that maps | the keyboard somewhat like you mention, I switched back to text entry | because it's faster for me. All the notes are under my left hand | leaving the | right hand free to manipulate the partition or mouse.
I was wondering if someone else would make a comment like this. I've played around a bit with a tcl/tk tool to handle abc, and one of the thing that I experimented with a bit was alternate keyboard mappings. I eventually decided it wasn't worth the bother, for pretty much the same reasons. One funny disappointment here: I play a chromatic accorion. You'd think it would map very easily to the typewriter keyboard. But it didn't. The problem was that the angle of the diagonals are wrong. I couldn't find any position for my hand relative to the keyboard that actually worked. The angle of the diagonals are just wrong for this use. Combined with the difficulty of figuring out how to deal with the non-note parts (bar lines, slurs, chords, ...), this was enough to give it up as an idea waiting for someone with some brilliantly innovative idea that will magically make it work. But I'm apparently not that someone. One side thought I had was that the "universal" keyboard just might work. This would really only need two rows for the notes, and you could use the top and bottom rows with their conventional mapping. Maybe some day, when I have the spare time, I'll experiment with this. Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the left hand is probably much of this. But this is really true only for plain, monophonic tunes, so maybe something clever is possible in other cases. -- O <:#/> John Chambers + <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> / \ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
