Auto Shift plugin?

Wondering if it would be difficult to create an Auto Shift plugin for Kaleidoscope just like available for QMK

@algernon and others? :bouquet::wink:

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Auto Shift wouldn’t be terribly difficult to implement. Right now, you could fake it on specific keys with Qukeys, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

It wouldn’t be hard to implement, and I’m happy to offer hints and help. I don’t think I’ll have time to implement it in the near future, though.

Would definitely get my vote. I’m finding shift the only thing that’s really causing me problems and slowing me down. Still keep hitting PageUp. I’m determined to get used to it, but it will take a while. I kept wondering why I find it so much easier to reach with my left hand than my right, then it hit me - octaves. I have pretty small hands for a bloke. Maybe OneShot might be a reasonable stepping stone?

Sounds fun. I’d be interested in giving it a whirl.

So I went ahead and took a stab at it. The repo is here.

Feedback is definitely appreciated; I don’t really know how this type of behavior is supposed to “feel”, so I’m not a good judge of the current shape of the plugin. As it is, I’m waiting until keyToggledUp() to send the unshifted keys. That seems like the correct solution, but I find the end result to be an aggravating typing experience. It’s entirely possible I’m missing something obvious; I’m not a programmer, after all.

Once the behavior is correct, I’ll make a separate release post.

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I have just uploaded an update to the plugin. It fixes the issue with ShiftToLayer not working (turned out to be a really easy fix).

I also uploaded a separate branch with a potential fix for another issue. Keyboard lagginess is the “aggravating” behavior I mentioned in my earlier post, and the lag-fix branch attempts to address it. Can anyone think of any issues that might occur thanks to the solution? If not, I’ll go ahead and merge it. It makes using the plugin actually tolerable.

Key_Backspace won’t always delete the previous character, though it’s much less likely than it used to be (lousy^H^H^H^H^Hfrustrating telnet TERM settings…)

In what situation would it not output the backspace? I haven’t encountered that issue myself (including in terminals).

It was very common in the 1990s, especially when connecting from one machine to a remote host — especially if that was a different flavor of UNIX, to have Backspace result in ^H (control-H) instead of deleting the previous character. This was especially annoying in Emacs, where C-h invokes the help command.

It’s quite uncommon now, but I bet it still happens on occasion. I think it was much more likely with telnet than ssh, but I’m not an expert on the issue. More information can be found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120621035133/http://www.ibb.net/~anne/keyboard/keyboard.html

I’m aware of it being an issue in the past; I just haven’t seen it happen in a long time. I tend to think that the very definite gains (no lag nor accidental character consumption) outweigh the slim chance of ^Hs. If a better solution exists, I’m happy to learn about it.