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Record totals rather than sequence of keys (for heatmaps etc) #42

@peterjc

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@peterjc

Current functionality: Each key press is appended to the log, which is a potential privacy problem as hinted at in the README.

New functionality: The software only records how often each key is pressed (in combination with modifiers, thus s, shift+s, ctrl+s, alt+s, ctrl+alt+s, etc would all be separate - and I'd consider treating the cap-locks status as another modifier or just like shift), and at a configurable interval (say every 10 minutes) it writes out a table of keys and number of presses. This could be JSON for ease of parsing.

Motivation: I like many people am now using a programable ergonomic split keyboard with a non-qwerty layout. We can use letter and punctuation frequencies in existing text to help tune key placement, but this misses out the other actions like cursors, backspace, and commands (e.g. command+s for save). This data will vary dramatically person to person, including factors like which OS, editor (e.g. vim versus emacs versus sublimetext), and other software they use (e.g. switching between applications with command+tab or virtual spaces). It would be ideal to record personal key usage frequencies (including modifier keys). There are tools to visualise this kind of data as a heatmap, e.g. https://github.com/pa7/Keyboard-Heatmap

Potential extensions:

  • Recording multiple keypresses (chording) would be nice, but not needed initially.
  • Recording key pairs would also be nice e.g. how often do I press "t" then "h", and would I benefit from a thorn key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) on my layout, and more generally a factor in keyboard layout design.

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