Various companies have tried to make five-finger chording keyboards over the years, but I have never seen one in person. I strongly suspect that they don't rea

Various companies have tried to make five-finger chording keyboards over the years, but I have never seen one in person. I strongly suspect that they don't really work very well. Hacking one together wouldn't be that hard, and yet you never see anyone but the diehard wearable-computing hobbyists using them. (The wearables folks, of course, really need the one-handed-typing feature.) If they bought you so much as a 10% improvement you'd expect to find hobbyists using them and raving about them... just look at the adoption of Dvorak, or ask me about my awesome Kinesis keyboard. The violin metaphor is a telling one: Despite their cost and the difficulty of learning to use them, violins and violinists aren't that hard to find. People take the trouble to learn violin because it pays off. So if you invent the chorded keyboard and twenty years later nobody has adopted it, you have to ask yourself whether you've really invented the equivalent of the violin. Perhaps you've invented the theremin instead: An instrument that is nigh-impossible to learn and that has no real repertoire beyond Good Vibrations and late-night monster movie soundtracks.