pinchord-12 Serial Mods

Pinchord · pinchord.git · Tickets · Changelog

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Symptom

Pinchord has had pinchord-4 Mods, but it has no way hold down mods, for things like holding control and dragging. This is quite an essential thing for a lot of applications, and a lot of people.

The only options right now are to either disable Pinchord and use another layer in QMK/Javelin, to use an extra row of keys for mods, if your board has one, or to keep another keyboard around and use its mod keys. None of these are particularly appealing options.

Potential Solution

The Plover HID protocol sends all keys as they're pressed, unlike say the Gemimi PR protocol, which send the entire stroke after all keys have been released.

Similarly, the keyboard protocol also gets key presses and releases, and a custom version of it (and the Plover HID protocol) could check whether a certain stroke is being held down at the current moment. This would allow you to check whether the mod stroke is held down, and start pressing the mod.

Questions

If you start holding the control stroke, then release it the A key, then press the O key to start holding shift, and then press T and release the stroke, what should get sent out? Control+shift+t, or just shift+t?
How do you actually send these key ups and downs, I don't think plover has a way to do that.

Notes

You can hack the parse_key_combo function to skip sending key releases and only send key presses.
If releasing one of AOIU releases that modifier, then sending a stroke like TWRAT for control+t might have you release A before T, causing you to press and release control, and then press and release control t, when you only meant to do the latter. For this reason, I don't think releasing keys can work. You should also release TWR and do the whole pressing and releasing as a unit. This also reflects the behavior of not having first up chord send on, which most people don't (it's off by default). I think it would also work better with first up chord send on, where releasing keys would cause the entire stroke to be released?