On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 21:23:44 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I have been thinking about this idea of a "reprogrammable
keyboard", in
that the keys are either a fixed layout with LCD labels on each
key, or
perhaps the whole thing is a long touchscreen, that allows
arbitrary
relabelling of keys (or, in the latter case, complete dynamic
reconfiguration of layout). There would be some convenient way
to switch
between layouts, say a scrolling sidebar or roller dial of some
sort, so
you could, in theory, type Unicode directly.
I haven't been able to refine this into an actual,
implementable idea,
though.
I've given this domain a fair bit of thought, and from my
perspective you want to throw hardware at a software problem.
Have you ever used a Japanese input method? They're sort of a
good exemplar here, wherein you type a sequence and then hit
space to cycle through possible ways of writing it. So "ame" can
become, あめ, 雨, 飴, etc. Right now, in addition to my learning, I
also use it for things like α (アルファ) and Δ (デルタ). It's limited,
but...usable, I guess. Sort of.
The other end of this is TeX, which was designed around the idea
of composing scientific texts with a high degree of control and
flexibility. Specialty characters are inserted with
backslash-escapes, like \alpha, \beta, etc.
Now combine the two: An input method that outputs as usual,
until you enter a character code which is substituted in real
time to what you actually want.
Example:
"values of \beta will give rise to dom!" composes as
"values of β will give rise to dom!"
No hardware required; just a smarter IME. Like maybe this one:
http://www.andonyar.com/rec/2008-03/mathinput/ (I'm honestly not
yet sure how mature or usable that one is as I'm a UIM user, but
it does serve as a proof of concept).
