Why can’t anyone just make a keyboard that works anymore..
I discovered that the Tactile Pro has the same kind of weird ghosting key problem as the Smartboard did. On the tactile pro, if I hit ‘o’, ‘p’, and the spacebar in that order with the right timing, sometimes I’ll get a spurios ‘enter’. This is highly irritating when I have to type ‘p5 opened’ all the time when I’m doing work.
Is it just something wrong with the ALPS keys? or is it that all keyboards have this problem but I just never noticed? My cheap MS natural at work has never emitted any random keystrokes that I didn’t ask it to. Is that just too much to ask these days?
update: Apparently this problem manifests itself more often in certain programs. For example, I originally noticed this problem in xterm, where it is very reproduicble (the sequence is actually ‘space’ ‘o’ ‘p’ very quickly). In Termial.app, it doesn’t happen (and neither in a Camino text field), but I did get a stray ^P which is also somewhat worrying.
update 2: Some apps seem to really be more sensitive than others. xterm is the the worst. aterm (from darwin ports) is slightly better, but it still happens. It rarely happens on Terminal.App, and never in camino or some other cocoa app. Still, it should never happen at all. I verified that indeed it never does happen with the iceKey. I actually tried mashing the keyboard for a good 5 minutes in xterm.
How is it that such an expensive keyboard can have such shitty circuitry? And why is it that I have to get a super high-end keyboard to ever see the problem? I’ve never even heard of this problem on a standard dell keyboard or any other cheap keyboard I’ve owned in the past. It makes me really start to suspect the ALPS switches….

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