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Aucb.671 fa.editor-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Mon Mar 15 04:08:28 1982 non-keyboard input devices >From Admin.JQJ@SU-SCORE Wed Mar 10 12:14:01 1982 Our discussion of keyboards on E-P seems to be focussing our attention away from an equally important issue -- the (growing) literature on non-keyboard input devices. My cursory reading of that literature indicates little agreement of late on what the best such input devices are (mouse? light pen? knee pedal? hand-heel pressure pad? auxiliary function keypad? ESP?). This raises two issues I'd like to see discussed; can any of you offer any comments on the following?

[1] What methodologies should we be applying to evaluate different sorts of non-keyboard input devices? Can we develop a cognitive model of their use (analogous to the Card/Moran/Newell or Rumelhart/Norman models of keyboard use) that would allow us to investigate comparisons? Can we ever reasonably measure their relative benefits outside of the context of a particular editor? If not, we're in trouble, since very few editors support more than one type of pointing device, making direct experimental comparison quite problematical. [2] Imagine an extensible editor such as Emacs which supports a variety of non-keyboard input devices. What primitives should be available to the Teco, Lisp, Mlisp, or whatever programmer to support this variety? My own bias is to hide from the programmer as many of the details of the interface as possible, just as we hide differences in terminal output functions. A typical problem: mouse-like pointers are normally implemented as essentially half-duplex (local to the workstation) for speed of response; even so, they are often quite slow (an Alto can't keep up with a rapidly moving mouse). How should we synchronize the mouse's cursor with the ordinary character-cursor maintained by the editor on the remote host? Another problem: such devices, in addition to providing a pointing mechanism, often provide additional keys, but the number and placement of such keys varies widely. How to standardize on meanings across devices? -------

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