Have any of you explored alternative input methods for playing Go on the computer? I don’t especially like using the mouse, but so far, it’s the best method for me.
I’ve tried Voice Goban, which is a really cool project. You select an area on the screen where the goban is, and then it takes audio input and controls the mouse. You just say coordinates (letter-number, and you can use the nato phonetic alphabet too). It’s pretty cool, but I don’t love it for faster games, and it’s not 100% reliable. Great accessibility tool, though!!
A friend of mine wrote a program to take input from a MIDI controller, like a digital piano, and convert it into mouse movement. It’s really cool, but pretty tricky to work with. He made it so I could fully customize exactly what each note/combination of notes did, but I wasn’t able to find a way to use it effectively without taking ridiculous amounts of focus. You can see a goofy example i recorded here - midiKeyboardGoMouseInput (link will expire in a day, but i can put it somewhere else if necessary)
I think I’ll explore that piano input method more later, but now that I’m learning about vim, I’m curious what kind of creative computer keyboard input methods might work for Go. Just typing coordinates feels a little clunky.
If you have a numpad, something like MouseGrid (nuance.com) might work really well.
You would maybe select a 9th of the go board, then another grid would pop up within that bit, and you’d select the exact coordinate using a single number. The same thing could work for the 19x19, by using the first input to select either tengen, one of the lines extending from tengen, or one of the 4 quadrants excluding the 10th line - then, assuming you didn’t play Tengen, you’d be left w/ either a line of 9 points or a 9x9 quadrant, and you’d go from there.
I think a cooler solution, though, would be to use vim-like motions. You could use hjkl to move one coordinate at a time, or multiple by using the number keys. Or maybe you could jump to the closest of a given shape. There are a lot of different motions that would work, I think.
Has anybody else here put much thought into this kind of thing? The use case is almost nonexistent, I’m sure, but it seems like it could be fun