Hi Forum,
I’ve been working on a concept to merge keyboard input with visual interface, which began as an idea for a desktop app:
I decided to build a prototype with TouchDesigner, which is turning into an interesting tool itself:
I’m posting to gauge interest and ask for thoughts about how this might live in the TD development world and grow into the desktop app world. Do any devs here have experience building outside TD e.g. Electron apps?
I really like this idea! As a vim user, it would be cool to expand this to include common operations, like parameter value modification (perhaps different keys are different increments, etc).
ah interesting… I like that! Breaking an ‘OP’ key down into params.
Is this something you can do with vim?
@ianl More just the idea of ‘modal’ interaction. Aka, just typing on a keyboard is normal input, and keyboard shortcuts are operations, whereas in vim typing normally only works in a certain mode. Exiting ‘insert mode’ makes every key on the keyboard do different operations, but with a composable language. For example, ‘d’ is delete, and ‘w’ is word, so if you type ‘dw’ it deletes the current word under the cursor. ‘d2w’ deletes the current and next word. It becomes very fast to manipulate text for programming.
This is a great start - having cascading / modal windows that not only let you create ops but also the visual feedback of the pop up screen - brilliant! But somehow adding more modes / contexts would be amazing. For example, a hot key to enter parameter edit mode, where the last selected parameter is modified by keystrokes. Then w/s increment and decrement, and a/d change the increment order of magnitude (.01 / .1 / 1 / 10 etc)
Thanks for the feedback!
Yes, I’ve dreamed about a completely context sensitive keyboard, real-time composing, etc…I have to be careful here and make sure to refine the simple version though 