logitech: make a keyboard with hyperscroll wheel, cherry switches

[urlwolf]

Well, thanks to patents, the decidedly best scroll wheel can only be had in logitech mice.

Please logitech: make a keyboard with hyperscroll wheel, and cherry switches!

But I don't think the patent covers keyboards, so maybe any brand can do this. A scrollwheel belongs in a keyboard, near the arrow keys. It's far more efficient to navigate source code and long docs than either paging or scrolling with arrows.

Somehow, I think this will never happen... Thoughts?

[Findecanor]

It's far more efficient to navigate source code and long docs than either paging or scrolling with arrows.

No, the most efficient way to navigate source code and long documents is to use editors/viewers with indexing mechanisms. With source code and technical documents, most of your navigation consists of jumping within the document (or between related documents) to entities which you know the name, but not necessarily the location of.

I find the scrollwheel to be useful mostly when browsing the web when the web site "designer" thought that he was supercalifragilisticexpialidociously smart and has screwed up the function of the arrow and page up/down keys. Example: Google image search.

The scrollwheel function is in apps not linked to the keyboard focus. It is linked to the the element that the mouse pointer is hovering over right now. This can be very annoying when you use the scrollwheel to scroll a web page.. and then it stops, because the mouse pointer happens to find itself over a Flash plugin.

However, I can see the usefulness of a new kind of scrollwheel where one step on the wheel up or down triggers a single key press on the corresponding arrow key.

[Phaedrus2129]

Would you really want a 4mm travel switch in a mouse? For reference, 90% of mice use an Omron switch with 0.5mm of travel.

[kps]

No, the most efficient way to navigate source code and long documents is to use editors/viewers with indexing mechanisms. With source code and technical documents, most of your navigation consists of jumping within the document (or between related documents) to entities which you know the name

Yes! (but not just technical documents). This is the power of the alphabet — the power to name anything with a fixed, small set of symbols — made tangible, literally brought to one's fingertips, by the keyboard.

[JustCallMeCrash]

Along a similar vein, I'm interested in adding a scroll-wheel to an existing keyboard, specifically this 11800 with a trackball and mouse buttons...  How rad would it be to totally remove my mouse?  I've basically done that now, but I'm (hating) using the arrowkeys to navigate webpages.  Sure, it's better than grabbing the slider on the side of the window, but not by much.  I have the perfect spot to throw a standalone scrollwheel in this thing, I just have to figure out HOW.  Also need to figure out how to wire it up...
Barring that... I'd like to remap the caps-lock key to act as a modifier to make mouse movements (this is a trackball) work as wheel rolls.  For example, it would be cool to hold down the Caps key and roll the trackball down to emulate mouse-wheeling down.  Anybody have any experience with that as a mod??

[alaricljs]

You can use AHK to have CapsLock as a modifier... The hard part would be fine tuning the code so that you get what you want out of the motion.  You are never going to get pure X or pure Y out of it, so the question is how to discriminate.

edit:  Of course that assumes you want to be able to scroll left/right as well as up down.  If you only want one direction it's cake.

[JustCallMeCrash]

You can use AHK to have CapsLock as a modifier... The hard part would be fine tuning the code so that you get what you want out of the motion.  You are never going to get pure X or pure Y out of it, so the question is how to discriminate.

True, true.  If I were using Windows, I could use AHK, but as I'm a Linux user, I'll just have to root around a bit to figure it out.  I did just make my CapsLock key into a Windows Key... so that's kinda nice.  It even works inside my VirtualBox installs. Nice!

[alaricljs]

Hmmm... that would have to be a fairly low level X app to modify mouse motion behavior.  As for the CapsLock deal, you can map it to a completely separate modifier as well.

[JustCallMeCrash]

I'm finding all kinds of cool stuff you can do with mod keys.  Very nice.

[daerid]

The most efficient way to navigate source code (IMO) is vim

Fin.