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?

5 Responses

  1. ethana2 says:

    January 21st, 2009 at 20:44

    Eww, qwerty.

  2. ethana2 says:

    January 21st, 2009 at 20:46

    ..not that SMS-style isn’t even worse. I fail to see how people can be so careless about the way they treat their poor fingers, or tolerate typing speeds so far under 80 wpm.

  3. Chris Lord says:

    January 21st, 2009 at 21:47

    Cool about the overhaul, but the old code worked too…? http://chrislord.net/blog/Software/multitap-pad.enlighten

  4. danielk says:

    January 21st, 2009 at 22:03

    That was just tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. ;-)

    But it is true that Multipress used to to require that the key that steps through a sequence is the same as the first character of the sequence. Which made it impossible to configure Multipress for the canonical use case — that is, emulate a mobile phone — with a normal PC keyboard.

    Now it is possible, and I also made it the default behavior.

  5. Gabriel Pannwitz says:

    January 23rd, 2009 at 09:25

    hilarious