Topic: the Twiddler (Page 1 of 1)

so, I went and bought, all the way from Canada, a one-handed keyboard called the twiddler 2.1.

It is a chording keyboard - you have to press several buttons at once for some letters.
There's a thumbstick integrated, so basically you can control everything with one hand.

Studies with the predecessor showed probates getting to around 60 words per minute.
For now I'm frustratingly far from that, especially since I push 120 wpm in the 'twidor' typing tutor on this annoying netbook keyboard...

Then again, the Twiddler default layout had to go. It is alphabetic, easy to remember, but 'tabspace' is based on letter frequencys and should scale better. Shame the new configurator wouldn't read the old file though, I had to set them all by hand.

One gotcha I should mention, it acts just like a keyboard, all letters get translated by your keymap - dvorak in my case. Wish I could tell windows to use per keyboard keymaps...

The thumbstick feels a bit too hard.

But I think once learned it'll make a nice mobile input device.

so long,

->Tyberius Prime

Hah, looks like a lot of fun!

Wow, never heard of that before TP
I wonder how long it will take to become comfortable with it?

about 20 20 minute sessions, this study suggests.

If you want to use in in linux, and are using a dvorak (or non us) keymap, I highly recommend sticking the
following code into /etc/hal/fdi/policy/twiddler.fdi and restart hal - it basically set's the interpretation of the twiddler's keys right,
I wish I could figure out how to do this in windows.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.product" contains="Twiddler">
      <-- Enforce XkbLayout=de and XkbVariant empty -->
      <merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">us</merge>
      <merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string" />
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

so long,

->Tyberius Prime