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BoBo
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 Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 10:14 am Post subject: Nostromo/Vim/AHK - Toomy's HO ... |
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| Quote: | Nostromo SpeedPad n52
I got the Nostromo SpeedPad n52 today on sale at PC Club for US$29.99.
Why would I buy one of these? I'm not much of a gamer, and I never play first-person shooters.
I didn't buy it to play games.
Two things drove me to buy this. The first is a renaissance in my interest in vim, my text editor of choice. I've been a vi user since 1991 or so, and a vim user since 1995. Every so often, I decide that I'll try something that's a little more Windows-native, such as TextPad or UltraEdit. But I always find myself wishing these programs could do more, could be more configurable, could be more powerful. There's no question that vim is powerful -- it's almost a platform in its own right -- but there's a steep, steep learning curve to understand all the different editing modes and to learn the powerful, though cryptic, commands. It's not something I would encourage for those who haven't already spent the time learning it.
But I have spent that time. The vim keystrokes are burned into my brain and :w feels as natural to me as ctrl-s, and :%s/foo/bar/g is eminently faster than pressing a key combo to pop up a find/replace dialog box, entering the text in the respective text areas, tabbing between them, checking the replace all box, and then pressing OK.
Vim has powerful text mapping capabilities, and I'm often hoping for extra keys where I can map something like shift-ctrl-alt-F24.
The second driver is AutoHotkey. It's derived from AutoIt v2, a UI-automation tool that can simulate key presses, mouse movements, window commands, etc. AutoHotkey brings one major improvement: the ability to assign hotkeys to active a script.
As it turns out, AutoHotkey can respond to buttons on joysticks as well as keys on the keyboard. Combine this with the Nostromo n52 and I can assign joystick button 15 to one of the keys there, then have an AutoHotkey script that is triggered by Joy15, and that then checks to see whether Outlook is the active app, or vim, and can send a different set of keystrokes for each one.
There's so much power and configurability available that I'm almost paralyzed by choices. I can start and stop different AutoHotkey scripts, thus I could have a text-editing-focused script running with a set of hot keys, or I could have an image-editing-focused script with the same hotkeys that perform different operations. The Nostromo has four layers, so that each button can have four different functions assigned to it depending on the shift state. The Nostromo software can load different profiles for the keyboard. It has its own set of macros, too.
I've found the kind of configurability and control that I've been seeking for years, but now that it's in my hands I'm having trouble deciding what to do with it.
I'm like the dog who finally catches the car. |
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Chris
Site Admin
Joined: 02 Mar 2004
Posts: 10467
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| Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 1:38 pm Post subject: |
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| Thanks for posting that. The "Nostromo SpeedPad n52" sounds great, especially with all the uses he has in mind for it! |
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twwilliams
Joined: 24 May 2004
Posts: 23
Location: Bellevue, WA USA
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| Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 3:00 am Post subject: |
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| Chris wrote: | | Thanks for posting that. The "Nostromo SpeedPad n52" sounds great, especially with all the uses he has in mind for it! |
That's my blog referenced above.
I haven't made as much use of the SpeedPad as I had hoped for. It's primarily due to trying to add keys and combos piecemeal rather than putting together a system that has some logic behind it and thus would be "re-discoverable" with a few days or even weeks away from using a few of the hotkeys.
I've grown so used to plugging AHK scripts into http://www.bayden.com/slickrun/ that I find I just don't have that much need for the additional programmability of the SpeedPad.
I'm also disappointed by the key feel on my n52. It's mushy and I just don't like pressing the keys that much.
But maybe I'll revisit it again thanks to the interest here.
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Tommy |
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