BAbacon_waffle·Aug 27, 2023
Edit: Check out Dasher for a much better interface to enter text with a cursor, compared to a virtual keyboard.
https://dasher.acecentre.net/ , source at https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher
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I remember seeing a program years ago, which used the mouse cursor in a really neat way to enter text. Seems like it would be far better than clicking on keys of a virtual keyboard, but I can't remember the name of this program nor seem to find it...
Will probably get some of this wrong, but just in case it rings a bell (or someone wants to reinvent it - wouldn't be hard):
The interface felt like a side-scrolling through through a map of characters. Moving left and right controlled speed through the characters; for instance moving to the left extent would backspace, and moving further to the right would enter more characters per time.
Up and
Read the rest
down would select the next character - in my memory these are presented as a stack of map-coloured boxes where each box held a letter (or, group of letters?), say 'a' to 'z' top-to-bottom, plus a few punctuation marks. The height of each box was proportional to the likelihood that letter would be the next you'd want, so the most likely targets would be easier+quicker to navigate to. Navigating in to a box for a character would "type" it. IIRC, at any instant, you could see a couple levels of letters, so if you had entered c-o, maybe 'o' and 'u' would be particularly large, and inside the 'o' box you might see that 'l' and 'k' are bigger so it's easy to write "cool" or "cook".
(I do hardware+firmware in Rust and regularly reference Richard Hamming, Fred Brooks, Donald Norman, Tufte. Could be up for a change)