Microchord is different. It's a chorded keyboard inspired by Engelbart's microwriter. Unshackle yourself from the traditional typewriter keyboard. Microchod is FOSS. It's extensible. It's cheap. It's designed for two-handed programming or one-handed plaintext input.
I designed it for the programmer use case by dedicating one hand to letters and the other hand to letters. There are modes for macros, and it runs on cheap and easily available hardware. When I have them, I will make available designs for 3D-printing your own case for the microchord so you can build your own with a 3D printer and a teensy 2.0.
In Alan Kay’s metaphor, the problem with bootstrapping in Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center was that while “Engelbart, for better or for worse, was trying to make a violin,” “most people don’t want to learn the violin.” User-friendliness, not coevolutionary learning, became the norm in the design of human-computer interfaces.
Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. (p. 215.)
The inspiration for this was an article on Engelbart's Violin and decided I was willing to take the time to build and learn a user interface that was worth learning, like a brush or fountain pen. Not the sidewalk chalk of the typewriter keyboard.
There is a place in the world for violins, however small it is.