[ale] Slightly OT: Coding program to hit several keys at once

[Charles Shapiro]

Hmm. This is not necessarily a language question, but more of a hardware
interface question.  I'd go a Googlin' on the Mighty Internet (or,
actually, DuckDuckGoin')  for stuff on "Chording Keyboards" and "N-Key
Rollover".  A desultory search turns up this interesting link (
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=16676.0 ).   I suspect most cheap
keyboards strain out double non-modifier or triple keypresses before they
even go over the wire to the computer.    A $150 or so "gaming keyboard"
might give you the hardware support you need.

-- CHS


On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 11:22 AM, Todor Fassl via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> I want to write some code to simulate a braille keyboard. A braille
> keyboard has 7 keys. One is the space bar. The other 6 you press at the
> same time in different combinations. So, for example, on a braille
> keyboard, to make the letter x, you press the 1, 3, 4, and 6 keys at once.
> I want to simulate that by allowing the user to press the f, s, j, and l
> keys at the same time. Does anybody know of a programming language that
> handles something like that nicely? If you were going to recommend a
> programming language to do that, what would it be?
>
> My goal is to write a text editor that allows a user to type braille and
> saves the output in BRF format. So the user hits the f, s, j, and l keys at
> once and the editor puts a BRF character x into the buffer.
>
> Right now, I'm leaning toward python because python has a gaming library
> that seems to allow you to hit several keys at once. But maybe somebody has
> done something like this in C or C++. I am about as sure as I can be that
> perl won't work. I don't particularly care about the programming language
> because by now I've learned so many different programming languages in my
> life I figure I can learn another one in a few days/weeks. I don't actually
> care if the code is portable to other operating systems other than linux.
> That might be nice but it's not important.
>
>
> --
> Todd
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20171205/b68f191f/attachment.html>