To answer your first question: There exists a great number of programmable keyboards that are, frankly, awesome. I used to use a Fingerworks TouchStream LP ke

To answer your first question: There exists a great number of programmable keyboards that are, frankly, awesome. I used to use a Fingerworks TouchStream LP keyboard that let you program the hell out of it. It was great... I had macros that would auto-type all sorts of handy things like my username, email address, etc. You could also program mouse movements into the thing. It supported ten finger gestures so basically the sky was the limit in terms of what you could program it to do. It had only one flaw: There was no tactile feedback so it was easy for your hands to get out-of-alignment resulting in incorrect characters being typed pretty often. On the other hand it was much faster to move the cursor around than a regular keyboard so correcting mistakes was less of a hassle.