What to do with your sawn-off number pad

Date: January 21st, 2009 by Author: Daniel Elstner

Are you one of those people who sawed off their keyboard’s numeric keypad? Don’t throw away that keypad just yet! There might still be a use for it as a nice birthday present for your SMS-crazed teenage sister, so she can type on her computer using the same awful interface as on her mobile phone!

It’s easy: After you have rewired the numpad using components from some spare keyboard, and secretly installed Linux on your sister’s computer, all that is left for you to do is to check out and install GTK+ trunk. Then just set the default GTK+ input method to Multipress, which has recently gone through a code overhaul. Apart from cutting the code to about two thirds the original size and using more efficient data structures, the new code now actually works, too! That is, it works like it was intended to on other keyboards than just the single one it was originally written for — i.e. it makes it possible to use a numpad to type text, SMS-style like on a mobile phone.

So, next time you decide to saw through your keyboard to save space — how about keeping the smaller end instead of the larger one?