Learn the various ways you can type using CharaChorder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4i0B1tfTO4
Character Entry means “one character at a time.” This is how most people are used to typing.
Most of the switches on your CharaChorder, when moved by themselves in any direction (north, south, east, west), will produce a single character, such as a letter or punctuation mark. Others perform other actions such as Space, Backspace, Delete, Tab, Control, Alt, and Shift. When your CharaChorder switches are used in this manner, we call it Character Entry.
A chord is a multi-finger key press where switches are pressed and released at the same time (or about the same time).
For example, the chord for “the” is t+e. When you trigger these switches simultaneously, the CharaChorder will automatically process your text and replace the t and e with the word the.
CharaChorder comes with a pre-set library of chords which you can manage and update as you like, choosing what switch combinations result in what words. For example, “night” and “thing” both use the same letters (N, I, G, H, T), but the corresponding chords are n+i+g+h for “night” and n+i+g+h+t for “thing.”
The timing of how closely you need to press and release switches for a chord is based on your CharaChorder Press Tolerance and Release Tolerance settings.
One unique feature of chording is that if you do not trigger a chord on your first try you can just continue to try to chord and CharaChorder will clean up the jumbled text once you are successful. Note that there are some characters, such as punctuation, which do interrupt this feature.
See this in action below where the chord “the” which is t+e is missed a few times but then finally successful.
Added in firmware 0.9.1, arpeggiate modifiers allow some of the modifier keys to be pressed after and independently of a chord. They will then replace the word with a new word as if both were chorded together. Note that no other key can be pressed between the chord and modifier key, nor does it with work with character entry.
For example, if you chord “take” and then press a switch corresponding to the Shift modifier, you will get “Take”. Do this again except press the Plural modifier and you will get “Takes”.
Just as your CharaChorder switches can be moved in four lateral directions (north, south, east, west), they can also be pressed in, or you might say down toward the floor (as opposed to south).