Well, it turns out that whenever I ssh’ed into work, the problem would reproduce itself. Odd. As I final test, I tried plugging the board into my windows desktop, and hit the “space, o, p” combination over and over again. Well then what do you know, I start to get capital o’s and capital P’s all mixed in. That combination was turning caps-lock on and off.
Then it all made sense.. ctrl+o in bash gives you a new line. On my mac, I had re-mapped caps-lock to control, so a ghost caps-lock signal was causing the random return-like behavior in my shell. I’m still not sure why it is so timing sensitive, but I was able to prove it was ghosting by replicating instead typing “caps-lock, p, and space” to verify that I got ghost o’s, and “caps-lock, o, space” to make sure that I got ghost p’s. Furthermore, I could hold o and p down, press space repeatedly, and see capslock turn on and off.
It’s really sad that such an expensive keyboard should have ghosting problems. Maybe it’s just something wrong with my typing style, but there should be nothing wrong with having three keys down at once. Especially on a keyboard that supposedly lets you type quickly, having flaws surface when one does type quickly just seems like just simply bad design.
Anyhow, back to the wireless. Curiosly, as I turned on the wireless keyboard, I typed some stuff in before it actually associated with the laptop. Those keys were not lost and actually came through, albeit slightly delayed. I’m sure this is done to overcome bluetooth’s unpredictability, but I wonder if this means that the scanning electronics in the Apple board is at least better than the Tactile Pro’s?