Wednesday, January 09, 2008

David Asks

Anyone use something like this for CAD? I keep thinking that there ought to be a modified keyboard or mouse that might make things cooler, but aside from the odd trackball user I haven't found anyone using anything all that innovative.

Have you?

6 comments:

will said...

my office-mate uses 3 mice (one trackball, two optical). not all at once though, and i think more to avoid carpal tunnel than anything else.

we have had innumerable conversations about the potential of usb foot-pedals, but have yet to try it.

Anonymous said...

I've thought about it, and I've spent a lot of time drafting in AutoCAD (probably around 2k hours last year-- thankfully we've hired two people to take over drafting for me), and I have it set up so that the commands I just most of the time are accessible from the left hand.

That is, the acad.pgp file is set up to map most of the commands that I use to one or two letter shortcuts on my left hand. My right hand stays on the mouse.

Same with gaming -- all the stuff I use is on my left hand, my right hand aims and fires. And, I use a trackball, so there's no mouse recoil.

Katy said...

If I was to be drafting for a living again, I would absolutely want to have a removable or supplementary number keypad to put on the left side of the letter keyboard, so that it would go numbers, letters, mouse. I've thought about this a lot, and unfortunately they don't make keyboards with modules that snap together for the different zones. Because that would be great, if I could rearrange it as I wished.

David said...

katy, there are usb numerical keypads that people use for laptops. would be trivial to use one of those and place it wherever you wanted.

what I wonder is if there is an alternate key arrangement available that turns out to be better for CAD than a standard keyboard.

Raising Them Jewish said...

Katy did have a great idea though... perhaps the designing of a keyboard that snaps together and apart with groupings of 5 or something. So you could take the standard and rearrange to anything you want.

Anonymous said...

Check out X-Keys for cool programmable keyboards with user printed keycaps. They also have a foot pedal keyboard thing.

http://www.piengineering.com/xkeys.php