Plan 9: actively maintained, runs well in a VM: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/
Smalltalk: many options, notably Pharo: http://www.pharo-project.org
Lisp machine emulators: http://www.unlambda.com/
Haiku is approaching a 1.0 release quickly: http://haiku-os.org/
And of course you can have a "real" keyboard if you desire, such as the Kinesis Ergo: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ Switching to this keyboard and the Dvorak layout is certainly an upgrade from consumer to professional equipment and, requiring about a month to retrain, will certainly dispel the illusion that discomfort is an essential and missing part of acquiring expertise at computing. The fact that I type faster than my peers makes the fact that I write code much more slowly than them all the more bizarre.
I'd love to know why superior technologies fail to conquer markets, particularly enabling technologies like Smalltalk, but my point is that our man Stanislav has no excuse: they exist now and he knows about them and can use them right now if he wants. Instead he seems to be embarking on some kind of ambitious hardware project. Good luck to him on that, but if his definition of success greatly exceeds (say) CoffeeScript or BeOS's success, he can expect failure, regardless of how long his ideas endure or how influential they are.
As a person who purchases items for need and function, not form, desire or promise [1], I get to see the distinction daily.
[1] all my current worldly posessions together cost 50% less than a new low-end MacBook Pro (bar one item - a musical instrument).
http://www.loper-os.org/?p=448
And the ground rules of computer system creation have changed. The reasonably-cheap, high-capacity FPGA now exists, as it did not in the age of the BeBox. It is no longer necessary for a hardware project to generate millions of sales (or any sales at all) in order to be "successful" (in the sense of actually remaining available to interested persons indefinitely.)
That being said, I am still working on a Linux-based emulator for the Loper architecture. In all likelihood, it will be unusably slow for any truly practical use, but will serve as a proof of concept (that is to say, agitprop.)
(Author of linked article speaking, in case no one noticed.)
Going back to the guy who built a motorbike in the desert, the Citroen 2CV is a remarkable piece of engineering and design, but everyone would rather drive a disposable iPod (ford) than a LISP machine (2CV).
This is precisely due to marketing and turd polish.
As someone who has played piano since he was eight, I can answer that question: you'd still be unusably slow.
This is the terrible secret of the chorded keyboard: it requires that you press multiple keys at once. Any good pianist can tell you that you can make your hand do high-speed delicate work, all over the keyboard, one note at a time, but dense chords cannot be moved through remotely as quickly, unless you're looking to develop carpal tunnnel. It's a misfeature of the mechanics of the human hand.
Also: have you ever seen a court stenographer at work? You are simply wrong. (At least, with regards to the limits of what human hands are ultimately capable of.)
Steno produces syllables at a time via chording. They say with a few months practice you can get to 120 wpm, and eventually over 200. Users rave about how much more productive they are when they can type as fast as they think.
"Every word my characters said to me came up on the screen as quickly as they could have spoken them. Before, in the time it took me to type out the six or seven letters that made up each word, my brain would cloud over and I would start second-guessing myself so much it was a mighty battle even to get to the end of a sentence. With steno, most words came in a single stroke, so my text was able to keep ahead of my doubts and excuses and just keep going. I could write for half an hour on the subway going home, or pull out my gear and do a quick 10 minutes in the park before schlepping onward to my next gig. Before, I would have told myself that I didn't have time to get anything substantial done in those few scattered intervals, that I needed several solid hours to get into the flow and mood of writing. After learning steno, I couldn't get away with that ploy. Before I knew it, my 10 minutes were over, but I'd managed to fill half a dozen pages. It wasn't even the speed that helped me do it, primarily; it was the fluency that steno gave to my thinking." http://plover.stenoknight.com/2010/04/writing-and-coding-wit...
Maybe a century down the road we will have vim-customized keyboards. Tangible keyboards will always have a place, I think, because they provide tactile feedback, unlike "pictures under glass" like you get with touch screens.
I agree that modal editing is a great idea, but I'm not convinced vim's is the best (even though I do use it in any editor).
http://mahast.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/keyboard.j...
Looks like the Twiddler site is selling the things (http://www.handykey.com/), but $200 is a lot for a thing I'm not sure would be any better than a regular keyboard. Also, thing like that really should be wireless. I do hope that with the ascent of mobile computing, we're going to see some more innovation with terminal design, since the age-old typewriter television paradigm really doesn't work on the move.
In general, besides RSI, I'm not sure how much the keyboard matters in the end. People who work in the analog, like carpenters, musicians and surgeons, can do better quality work with better quality instruments. But programmers work in the digital, like writers and mathematicians. Mathematicians don't generally worry about how the craftsmanship of their whiteboard markers affects the quality of their work.
Compare that to a macbook air.
However, 99% of that equipment is a black box designed for the lowest grade user which is the very apt point of the article.
You are not a professional - you are a salt mine worker as am I.
The conjecture about keyboards being suboptimal is verifibly true, but that does not automatically extend to the machine as well. I also suspect coding experiences will be pretty subjective.
[1] http://cdn1.mobilemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/image_6...
Pushing down and aligning your fingers is incredibly accurate but rolling/moving your fingers is not.
If we consider his idea in the realms of mathematics, amateurs and experts still only/mostly use a pencil, graph paper and their minds.
A keyboard and mouse is more than enough to code.
But you miss how beautiful and fluid pencil and paper really are!
Many centuries of civilization have innovated and iterated on the pencil/paper combination. For visual and tactile possibilities, pencil and paper vastly outstrip a mere board of buttons (keyboard). You get tactile feedback, varying thickness and darkness, and you can crease and rotate the paper as you shape your design. Future interaction will resemble pencil and paper, not a keyboard or iPad!
Probably not. At least one generation of children has already grown up without proper penmanship training, and for them, the experience of handwriting at any length ranges from awkward to excruciating.
