You can go lower-tech than the OLED method and have a printed legend with a bank of lights to represent row or column selection. In practice, every time I expe

You can go lower-tech than the OLED method and have a printed legend with a bank of lights to represent row or column selection. In practice, every time I experiment with "big" control surfaces with a lot of buttons and macros, it doesn't end up being used. The apps where it comes up, I generally move towards a written script, and then I am just doing regular typing again. When you go large there's a penalty in that your arm is moving farther to access things. So, as with GUI vs CLI you end up moving faster with the stenographer's approach of rote sequences with intensive chording. I think there is something underexplored in the idea of adding visible modality to the controls though. We can have more than caps lock, num lock, scroll lock. There should be a genuine "Unicode keyboard" that can emit the codepoints directly without the help of the OS it's talking to.