This is such a cool idea, and the nerd in me loves the alternate input idea.
My problem with this, and it's such a niggly problem that's it may not even be worth mentioning, is that this will only work when you've got the footpedal around and I'd be frustrated when I sat down at a computer and didn't have it.
Like the author's note about muscle memory and wanting to hit the ESC key. I'd be frustrating to get the pedal into muscle memory and then forget it.
Sure you can learn a new system, but it's nice to know that vim is vim, regardless of the device you're connected via. Same is true for Emacs. Boy, an ALT key at my foot would spoil me rotten.
Is there a way to send data back to the Teensy? That way you could have a program on your computer that tells it "hey, I'm in vim now, so use 'i' and 'Ctrl-['" or "hey, I'm in emacs now, so just be 'Left-Alt' now".
If it's "just a keyboard" and doesn't normally support that, I've seen hacks that utilize the Caps/Scroll/Num lights as inputs back into a keyboard...
I'm not sure if there is a way to send signals back to the device. But, it should be trivial to do what you describe on the operating system level. Ignoring the possibility of specifically looking for that keyboard, you could just have is send obscure keys that you would never type. Then you can just re-map them on the OS level whenever you want to.
Thank you for posting this, it's an awesome project for cheap. It would be nice to include my feet in my workflow and not just my hands.
It would be cool to implement the pedal as a hot-key reader. Say you press the pedal down and type 'ff' and let it go and firefox launches, or type 't' and a terminal opens.
It's not just Ctrl-[ that does this, Escape does it too. We just typically don't toggle between insert mode / ESC in vim fast enough and enough times to notice it. With the pedal it's quite easy to press and release it a bunch of times before you type anything.
Now that I notice that behavior it is really weird. Anyway, if that is a problem/annoyance for you, then you could try switching to insert-mode by using append ('a') instead, which will bump the cursor up a character and counter ESC bumping you down one.
My problem with this, and it's such a niggly problem that's it may not even be worth mentioning, is that this will only work when you've got the footpedal around and I'd be frustrated when I sat down at a computer and didn't have it.
Like the author's note about muscle memory and wanting to hit the ESC key. I'd be frustrating to get the pedal into muscle memory and then forget it.
Sure you can learn a new system, but it's nice to know that vim is vim, regardless of the device you're connected via. Same is true for Emacs. Boy, an ALT key at my foot would spoil me rotten.