Your idea is very intriguing, and I would love to know more about i!!
I had a similar idea, which I had emailed TekGear about a while ago. I am in full agreement that utilizing both hands has many benefits, not only to help reduce twiddler-syndrome, increase productivity, make the twiddler easier to use (I'm looking at you pinky-row buttons >:( , haha), and increase overall 's power of the system.
A lot of you are probably aware that in English, the 100 most common written words make up approximately 50% of written/typed material. The first 25 most common written words make up approximately 33%! (just as a side note, by " words," I mean lemmas or "words having the same base meaning," which in a number of cases need to either be pluralized, or in some other fashion conjugated (examples: "think" and "thinks; "am" and "are"; "ran" and "running" are counted the same. This makes the above mentioned word sets a bit optimistic in representing word sets representing of 33% and 50% respectively, but still incredibly helpful, simply take a look at even just the first 25 words and consider how frequently those are used, specifically in the forms listed here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English.
(I do have a system for what strings (such as affixes) and commands might best be added next. When I have the chance, I will add my suggestions to the board, a better format, for critiques and thoughts (from anyone interested).
By the way, here is email I had previously sent to TekGear ( again, thoughts and fairly worded criticisms are more than welcome):
"Dear Tek Gear,
As a disabled person who needs to use the computer for work and everyday life, I first want to thank you for your commercial product, the twiddler 3. It provides an enormous benefit in that I can switch between modalities of entering text; I have mainly had to use speech-to-text software the last several years. As you can imagine, this can be ridiculously time-consuming.
I had a couple questions and an idea that like to share regarding using the twiddler 3. The first question, which after looking online for a while, I have not been able to find an answer, is: if I have two twiddler 3s, can I run on the same computer at the same time?
Why would I want to do this? In short, even greater typing speed and less stress-per-hand. This is my current desired personalized configurations for the left-hand twiddler and right-hand twiddler, which would of course be different from each other:
While the left-hand twiddler would retain a configuration similar to default, wherein the main bulk of chords are mapped to individual letters, the right-hand twiddler is one whose main purpose is to have the first 50, or 100, most common words found in English text by frequency, mapped to the chords that would otherwise type individual letters. This is much less ambitious than it sounds actually. As someone who's specialty and research at University was in psychology and linguistics, and who is proficient in Spanish and Japanese (language acquisition); many of the same study/practice techniques to memorize/internalize the proposed set of seemingly random words can be used to great effect. By practicing five to ten new words from our set per day, coupled with a simple schedule of rehearsing/practicing already-learned words/chords at intervals of one-day-after, three-days-after, seven-days-after, etc., efficient memorization can take place. As for perhaps the most intimidating prospect, knowing what chord each word is set to when there is no algorithm for predicting what will be typed based on the positions of your fingers, unlike the default configuration's alphabet, there are numerous memory techniques that can be used.primarily, I intend to use the "peg-system." First I will associate numbers one through 26 with the chords whose defaults are "a" through "z." Next I can associate successive "common words" to the numbers, and to employ the peg-system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_peg_system). This is a project I'm starting today! Wish me luck! (Just FYI, even writing this much using my speech-to-text software has taken me about an hour; now that is SLOW).
My second and final question is, if it is possible to use two twiddlers at the same time, how difficult do you think it would be to create a modification to the twiddler program on the computer that identifies and executes input from a single twiddler (or to create a third-party program), allowing for distinctive chords to be made up by combining keypresses from both twiddlers simultaneously? I hope to eventually pass from intermediate proficiency with Python to extreme proficiency, now that typing/coding is becoming more accessible to me.
Thank you very much for your time, and I'd love any answers you could provide as well as any thoughts you might have on my idea for how to approach the 100-most-common English words found in text being usefully mapped to a twiddler,"
-twiddlerwolff