Thursday, November 27, 2014

Vim and disabillity accessability

As some of you may recall from earlier posts of mine I have
cerebral palsy, and Vim's character-sequence commands are a great
help to me to overcome my motor disability. However there are as
we all know commands which use ctrl and shift key combinations.
Hitherto I've been reasonably able to use such commands and to
type (initial) caps in insert mode without using capslock. Since
a month, however, I have a muscle inflammation in my right
shoulder which to a large extent has deprived me of the use of my
right hand, since working with it for any extended time (more
than one hour or so) causes considerable pain which endures for
hours, and I have been told that this will take four to six
months to heal! So now I'm looking for some clever mappings to
relieve me of having to use the shift and ctrl keys, and
hopefully also the alt key entirely. I'm thinking of adding
something like the following to my .vimrc:

for num in range(char2nr("a"),char2nr("z"))
let char = nr2char(num)
exe printf("map <F3>%s <S-%s>", char, char)
exe printf("map <F3><F3>%s <C-%s>", char, char)
exe printf("map <F3><F3><F3>%s <S-C-%s>", char, char)
for key in ["i", "c"]
exe printf(":%smap <F4>%s %s", key, char, toupper(char))
endfor
endfor

My first question: is there some way to 'intercept' existing
mappings like `<S-{some-char}>{some-key}...` so that I can use
some combination of single-key presses instead of
`<S-{some- char}>` without remapping every `<S-{some-char}>{some-key}...`
mapping individually?

My second question: the same for shift+key outside the A-Z range,
or alt+key combinations, since on my Swedish kblayout e.g. `>` is
a shifted keystroke, and all of `{ } [ ]` are alted keystrokes.
Can I do that in some elegant way which will work even if I
change kblayout, or will I have to e.g. make a dictionary with
all non-a-z `'{unshifted-char}': '{shifted-char},'` mappings on
my specific layout, and similarly for alt+key mappings and
skift+alt+key mappings and loop through them?

BTW I've found that I can't get the sticky-keys feature of GNOME
to work, inside or outside Vim. :-(

/bpj

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