Monday, March 31, 2008

If we truly want both steno-stroke memory and complete qwerty-style keyboard emulation, we'll have to take mouse clicks and other arbitrary jump tools into account. As long as navigation is accomplished by either steno or keyboard commands (whether with the arrow keys, j/k, or whatever), we can calculate the position of the cursor and whatever it's next to, and determine by that whether we're at the beginning of a sentence and should capitalize the first word, for instance. But what about jumps precipitated by searching or scanning? What about mouse clicks? It seems like a constant reckoning of "where are we, and what was entered into the location immediately previous to us, irrespective of when?" might be more practical than trying to do the math in a linear sequence. But how much will that slow us down? What about jumping between windows? If one window has a period at location [X] and we enter a new word into location [X+1] in another window, do we have to worry about it being capitalized? Not if we're careful, I think, but it could get complicated. Do all programs even have the capability to tell us where our cursor is? I'm thinking not; certainly not without translating formats. Can we do it by reading the lines/bytes in the file? But what about white space and other invisible markers that might throw us off? This is a puzzle.

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