Comment Re:Still being made... (Score 1) 304
I've had an Erase-ease Keyboard For Compaq Computers for a long time now.
Surprisingly, almost without me noticing it, it's become my silent workhorse. It's fairly heavy and stiff, with just enough key feel for the speed I type. It has nice key surface sculpting, too. Every couple of years I shake an entire meal out of the mechanism and give the key caps the car wash treatment. It still works great, but does get a bit sticky for a few days after being washed.
I had two of the old IBM keyboards around, but I simply type too fast to use one as my main keyboard. My typing oscillates between high speed ticking and a low frequency buzz. IBM keyboards are noisy and stiff and I began to wonder about the strain on my fingers, as well.
On this keyboard I've never actually forced myself to use the backspacebar key. I popped the the key cap off the right Windows key a long time ago. Miraculously, Firefox is now the bane of my typing existence, since any accidental strike of the right ALT key takes me into a modal menu-bar mode.
About six months ago I bound the Linux compose key to capslock and set it up to generate mdashes and ndashes and a whole bunch of HTML markup.
I have <blockquote> bound to caps-q-a and </blockquote> bound to caps-q-s. I have <nowiki> bound to caps-w-a and </nowiki> bound to caps-w-s. I guess it's obvious what software I use for taking notes. What a godsend to have a useful capslock key. Now if I could just shoot someone at the Mozilla Foundation for perpetrating the modal Alt key to activate the drop-down menubar, my keyboard life would be nirvana.
Yeah, maybe there's a Firefox setting to disable this. Can't be bothered just yet. Too many moving carpets. This I learned from Ubuntu. If you hate something, do nothing about it. If twelve months down the road some twenty-something GUI designer asshole hasn't already yanked the carpet out from underneath you consider investing three minutes of quality Google time in stone-from-shoe removal prowess. (My what sharp fangs you have, Grandma! All the better to service the tablet marketplace, my darling little Ms Underhood.)
For example, I use middle-click paste all the time, while also carrying a to-be-pasted item around in my regular paste buffer (and even more in my clippy tool). I'm sure I read something about some distro/desktop deciding to eliminate this from their next GUI iteration, right before I hit the emergency stasis field activation button and curled into a foetal ball.
What I desperately want is a middle-click erase-paste, in which the contents of the target area are vaporised prior to the paste operation (clearing out search boxes is especially annoying). I just noticed that the paste happens on button release. A long middle-button press could be a field erase operation. Then long-press/release would be paste-replace. That would be golden. All the methods I know to quickly delete a field involve first selecting the field, which really sucks when you're already carrying something in your X buffer.
Hard on the heals of my compose key triumph, I might give it a go at some point in the next six to nine months.