I come to sit down seeking inspiration, as intended yesterday. Inspiration for what? The next game, and to do so with the same intention as always, because it seems to sprout out of me.
I grew tired of that damn blinking cursor and set the blinking cursor to a fixed state. I am liking it so far. If we are to get serious about text, we must document what can be accomplished with the keyboard and a simple text-box, in MacOS for the time being.
Do I miss the non-blinking cursor?
Would it be better off a bit more fat?
I guess I would be fiddling too much, but this would be the purpose of the game. To follow a ghost cursor around, repeating what one is doing and typing? Well, I guess the first question is, will this be a game of writing? But I must be as “normal” as possible, will this be a big challenge? First I must approach the problem in the simplest way possible, which is to set up a simple experiment to understand how is it that the game might work. But, in order to discard useless paths, let us simply play with some ideas regarding cursors and text-editing techniques with my own keyboard, because I consider myself a very cumbersome deleitante of the keyboard.
I don’t even know how to front-delete text. I have found now: Ctrl-D. But that’s awkward, fn-delete is better. I ought to teach both, or only one? The better answer is good enough, I may offer alternatives, depending on how things shape up.
The spelling and grammar dialog sucks. Not worth mentioning…
Option-Delete for deleting words, this I knew but somehow forget.
Ctrl-K is control-kill.
Fn-UpArrow scroll up one page, I never use the pagination keys, but let us try… Ah… Nice, I can see without having to move the cursor. This opens up new possibilities.
Fn-LeftArrow and Fn-RightArrow go to the beginning and the end of the entire document, great.
Fn, Shift, and Ctrl are quasimodes for keyboard control. Is Command one of them? Ah, I see, I jump to the beginning and end, so the answer is yes. So we have four quasimodes. Alt, does alt do anything? jumping words, of course, so if we explain this through a theory of quasimodes, it may make more sense to make this problem more simple, and simply focus on the behavior of one quasimode at the time. Which is most important?
Alt perhaps. But I use this because this is how I delete my own trailing thoughts, I will select and then delete, unless I type Alt-Delete. Of course, I am just realizing ways of using the keyboard. If I prototyped it, how would it look? would I have the time to complete a prototype at this time? It is almost 9pm and I would say: it is best to perform the task in times of more creative energy, the purpose of this relaxation is to write down some thoughts regarding interaction.
Let us start using the keyboard in its most common use, the arrow keys to move the cursor. What do I do to make navigation of the insertion point more interesting? I can hold Alt to jump back and for by word and by… Paragraph, the hands seem to hold the knowledge to this, I can only discover my own gaps in knowledge to what is already known by my hands.
Let’s focus thoughts.
This seems to be an interesting challenge where I hold many gaps in knowledge. If framed into a sentence I would call this the lifeboat that guarantees good port. It took me a ten meditation meditation to come up with that answer. Know that all work done in this direction is sacred, and thus treat it this way.
The sacred must be acted upon.