 I did something fun this week: I made a typewriter simulator! It ended up being more complex than it seemed. You can overtype, rotate paper, set margins, use Wite-Out, change ribbons… Let me know what you make! (Desktop only so far.) https://shifthappens.site/typewriter/ 27 comments
@herrprofdr I’ll think about it! I mostly didn’t have the right visual assets for this. But I was also worried it would be annoying. @mwichary What a delight! My 8-year-old was instantly curious looking over my shoulder. Made me wonder if anyone's ever made a regular text editor or word processor where the cursor stayed fixed in place and centered but moved the text as you typed, typewriter style. It's an interesting effect, recontextualized.   @mwichary “łucznik” this ain't :-) (and thank you very much for the trip down the nostalgia lane, it's almost as clunky as i remembered, but without the need to physically fight the device) @mwichary Nice! Although I guess I meant while I was typing. At the moment it's like I'm typing with my nose on the paper. Also I would love to hear sounds - it's by far one of the most satisfying aspects of typewriting. Oh and being able to over-type until the paper fibers start to tear apart lol @mwichary cool demo! just want to report a small catch: i have my caps and esc swapped via X11's global config. In the page, it seems the physical caps key does nothing, and the physical esc key becomes both esc and caps.
@mwichary Tried to hack blend modes into the text using inspect element so the red (and other) coloured characters wouldn’t show if typed atop a black character. Didn’t work for some reason but perhaps worth a look?  @TexJoachim @mwichary I was thinking further than that, that it would be really nice to have a sense of "direction" for the hammer, depending on what key is pressed (which of course would be different for different keyboards). But this is not a criticism of the app, it's more "it's so cool, how can we make it even better?"   |
Gregory's Server
@mwichary I was hoping it'd jam if I typed certain key combinations together too quickly!