Originally published at: This copy paste keyboard started as an April Fool's joke. Now you can buy one | Boing Boing
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There’s a currently growing interest/market in “macro keyboards” (ancillary ‘smaller’ keyboards one has to find room for near the mouse but not so close as to interfere with the mouse). These all have the result of replacing a commonly typed sequence of keystrokes with one push (lift the hand off the keyboard, move aside the Cadbury wrapper, find the key with the Squidward face on it and hit it). So here’s my question to the cosmos: What redundant key sequence are people having to type every seventy-three keys that these seem like a good idea? (“Well they’re gamers, ain’t they?” “nah, ‘the’” “naaahhh… 'Dear this American Life…” “I just use emacs, m’self”)
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Yep.
I’ve been looking for one that allows me to mute/um Teams when I’m in a meeting. The closest I’ve gotten so far is a sort-a working one based on a Pi2040, and some brute force configuration of an Elgato Stream Deck Mini, which takes up a ton more room. 
:: goes looking at the product :: Oh HO, it can be customized! It’s running QMK under the hood, which makes life a bit easier.
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There are two niches for macro keyboards that I’m aware of personally. One is streamers, which is largely covered by stuff like Stream Decks, where having shortcuts to run multiple commands to OBS/Twitch chat/etc. at once without breaking your concentration by app-switching can be very handy. The other is artists, who can set up single-button inputs for whatever keyboard shortcuts their drawing application of choice uses. Photoshop, for example, has a million arcane keyboard shortcuts that require pretzel-fingers to accomplish. Apps like Procreate on iOS, where a standard keyboard isn’t (as) essential, also have a cottage industry of bluetooth mini-pads full of customizable buttons for those things where it’s too inconvenient or cumbersome to use a gesture or on-screen quick-menu input. Having a little pad of buttons that you can use one-handed while you’ve got your tablet pencil in the other is super convenient.
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I can see why it would be helpful to have an easy way to send SIGINT signals, but what’s the point of being able to scroll down in Emacs when you can’t scroll up? /s
Since copy / paste is used so much in video editing, and since I’m sometimes on a mac and sometimes a PC, in my custom keyboard layout I have 3 as copy and 4 as paste (and shift-3 undo, shift-4 redo).
No hitting control or command, so much nicer. In fact, I’ve moved every keyboard shortcut I use to the left side of the keyboard - and made them all lowercase or uppercase, no command or command-shift nonsense - so my right hand never has to leave the mouse (you can check out my setup here, and a video about them here and a video of me using them here).
I spent years in a CMX online edit suite, so Q is overwrite edit (shift-Q insert).
Ben Popper just failed to give credit to Wallace Wood and his rule of drawing…
“Never draw what you can copy, never copy what you can trace, and never trace what you can cut out and paste down.”
Learned that in 1978.
Custom mini-keyboards are popular.
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Photoshop is the main program that tempts me. Some of the specialized macros I’ve set up in program are two handed shortcuts, but I still want access to the mouse. Being able to map the half dozen most frequently used macros to a single key I can hit with my left hand would speed up some of my processing tasks substantially.
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Recording actions and assigning them to a key (or a pair of keys) will speed up Photoshop processes.
Yeah, I’m talking about speeding up beyond the actions. I’ve got a few dozen actions scripted, but some of them require either deeply weird hand positions or using both hands. Once you have enough actions you are only going to speed them up by moving some to easier switches that can be handled with one hand. The time savings would be minor, but on the days I’m handling a few hundred images, saving even a quarter of a second adds up.
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It really needs a usb c connector?
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