I got the UK version, as that’s what I’m used to, but there are some significant deviations from a traditional UK layout: Normally there are three punctuation keys to the right of the ‘L’, but on this keyboard there are only two. The missing ‘#’ key has been moved above the Enter key and duplicated next to the Alt key. Normally on a UK keyboard, the Enter key is nice and big and covers two rows, but here the relocated ‘#’ key takes up half of this space. The Enter key is the same height as all the other keys (US-style). Also, there is no right-hand Ctrl key—Insert is positioned there instead. A picture is probably in order…

Adjustment

At first I found myself hitting ‘#’ or Page Down instead of Enter, Enter instead of ‘#’, and the Up-arrow instead of Shift. The ‘#’ key next to Alt was disastrous, as holding it down instead of Alt would result in a line of hash characters zooming across my document.

I used the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to move ‘#’ to Shift+3, like the US layout, and I moved the ‘£’ symbol to AltGr+3. I disabled the original ‘#’ keys altogether. It wasn’t possible to remap these individually as the two ‘#’ keys have the same scan code. I left the ‘~’ character on Shift+#, as that doesn’t cause accidents. [1]

I restored the missing right Ctrl by putting it on the strangely-positioned Insert key with SharpKeys. I can manage without an Insert key, as I rarely use it, and TouchCursor gives it to me on Space+Y anyway.

The function keys are hard to distinguish, as they’re not grouped into sets of four like I’m used to. On a conventional keyboard I can touch type some of the function keys, or at least target them with my peripheral vision, but here they are too small and bunched together. Sticking bits of fluorescent post-it note above F5 and F9 has helped, but it’s still too easy to hit a number key instead.

In summary

The good:

• It’s compact — My mouse now sits where the numeric keypad would have been, so it is not so far to move my hand. (Also, I used to annoy myself regularly by banging the mouse into the side of my old keyboard. This no longer seems to happen.)
• The key action is pleasant — to my taste — with a fairly short travel and a firm-ish resistance.
• It’s cheap!

The surmountable (with re-programming and re-learning):

• Small (US-style) Enter key.
• Non-standard ‘#’ locations.
• No right Ctrl key.

The bad:

• Small function keys in a compressed layout.
• Too many keys to the left of the space bar.
• No means to tilt the keyboard forward.
• When you want to use the standard cursor key layout, it’s not there.

Overall, it is nice to have a smaller keyboard and, using TouchCursor, I hardly miss the standard cursor keys, but I’m not in love with this keyboard. If I stumble across an alternative with fewer compromises I expect I’ll switch.

Notes:

[1] If you have this keyboard and want to try my remapped keys, you can install my keyboard layout.

The first piece of mouse-driven interface I discarded was the Windows Start Menu, thanks to the excellent Launchy, which lets you launch programs and open folders and URLs with the keyboard. The thing I like about Launchy is that it requires no setup — By default it scans your start menu folders, desktop and bookmarks, and the command that you type to launch a program or bookmark is simply a portion of it’s name. If you want to customise the behaviour, you can, by adding folders to scan and file types to scan for.

After using both Firefox and Explorer in parallel for a while on my different PCs, the Firefox apostrophe key (incremental search in hyperlinks) got me off the fence. It doesn’t completely eliminate the need for a mouse, nor is it always the best way of navigating, but there are situations where it can enable completely mouse-free browsing.

An example of the synergy of these tools is looking up some function documentation when I’m coding: For instance, to look up OpenGL’s glViewport function on the web, without reaching for the mouse, or even for the cursor keys, I can open a browser bookmark with Launchy (Alt+Space, “opengl”, Enter), go straight to the function I’m looking for, even though the required hyperlink is way off the bottom of the screen (apostrophe, “glvi”, Enter) and scroll up and down the page (or correct any typos in the search terms) with TouchCursor. Then it’s back to the code with Alt+Tab. Nice.

This prompted me to focus on a problem with the earlier versions of TouchCursor, which failed to send keystrokes to the VMs. There was a workaround – Install it on the guest OS – but that was a pain, and what if your guest OS wasn’t Windows? Then you were out of luck.

There turned out to be two issues causing the problem with the virtual machines:

Firstly, a straightforward bug in TouchCursor: The VMs were processing hardware scan codes, while TouchCursor was only dealing with Windows virtual key codes. This seems obvious with hindsight – The guest OS will be sent hardware-like events with the minimum of host OS interference. Fortunately this was easy to address, using the Win32 MapVirtualKey() function.

The second problem was caused by the order in which Windows hook functions get called when a keyboard event occurs: The most recently added hook gets called first. The VMs installed hook functions after TouchCursor, so they received keyboard events that it hadn’t modified. The current version of TouchCursor takes steps to stay at the front of the chain, so it continues to get the keyboard events first. [1]

Conceptually, TouchCursor is a modification to the keyboard. Your fingers get used to where the keys are and if they’re not always where you expect them, the result is disastrous. I am happy to say that the recent fixes have brought TouchCursor a step closer to behaving like part of the hardware.

Notes:

[1] VMware’s new “enhanced virtual keyboard” feature seems to step outside the hook system altogether, causing the original problem to reappear. Fortunately this can be addressed by disabling this option in the VMware settings and TouchCursor then works as it should.

I had been getting increasingly irritated by the effect that using the cursor keys was having on my typing. I touch type, after a fashion, so I don’t look at the keyboard while I type. I can hop across to the cursor keys with no difficulty, but I’d sometimes end up mis-aligned after coming back and would start typing garbage (Requiring another diversion to the backspace key and another re-alignment). Even without any typos, it slowed me down.

I’d been dimly aware of the Wordstar “diamond” of cursor keys for a long time. Also, games like Quake typically use the A, S, D and W keys to control movement. If only I could use this sort of layout when editing text!

The last straw was being given a laptop. I wanted to use it, but with its tiny and badly positioned cursor keys, I found it unusable for programming.

A Google search for solutions came up empty, and I didn’t find out that vi could have helped me until later, which is probably a good thing: It would have led me to accept a separate navigation mode in a single editor instead of TouchCursor’s non-modal solution that works in anything.

So TouchCursor was born. There were various deviations from my inspirations: I chose to default to a right-handed layout, to make things similar to the conventional cursor keys. I couldn’t use Ctrl to shift to “cursor mode” like Wordstar, because applications use that in combination with letter keys for many existing functions, and Ctrl would be needed in combination with cursor keys anyway. I tried a mode switch (like vi) and discarded it because I couldn’t keep track of which mode I was in. After considerable experimentation with space bar trickery, I found a solution that feels completely solid. The result is easy to use, doesn’t conflict with existing hotkeys and doesn’t require any re-learning of left hand actions (that is, Shift, Ctrl, and Alt combinations). For me, it’s absolutely indispensable.