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I actually bought one a while back for the emacs metakeys issue which had 4 buttons (it was originally designed for turning pages on a pad while playing music). It worked pretty well while it lasted, but broke after like a year.

Having a qmk split keyboard (the iris specifically https://keeb.io/collections/iris-split-ergonomic-keyboard) was a more lasting solution that also solved some other ergonomic issues. Now my thumbs do more than just thonk the space bar. Control, shift, space, meta, backspace/delete, enter alt and esc are now done by thumbs instead of pinkies.



I think resourcing foot pedals from the music world (guitars and bass mostly) would be the way to go, they're designed for heavy use and would likely be much more durable.


A lot of these USB pedals are about as sturdy as piano sustain pedals.

More literally though, the Logidy UMI3[1] is a MIDI-over-USB foot controller that uses guitar pedal-like switches. It's designed to serve as a hardware interface to software loop control, but you can use a MIDI yoke or translator[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] to turn MIDI input into keystrokes, game input, etc.

1: https://www.logidy.com/umi3

2: Using just `aseqdump` to capture input, `xdotool` to simulate keystrokes, and a 7-line shell script to glue them together: https://superuser.com/questions/1170136/translating-midi-inp...

3: https://www.bome.com/products/mtclassic

4: http://www.varal.org/ttymidi/

5: https://midikey2key.de/

6: https://hautetechnique.com/midi/midishortcut/

7: https://github.com/xobs/midi-to-keypress (Rust, Linux/macOS/Windows, open source)

8: https://charlie-roberts.com/midiStroke/, https://github.com/charlieroberts/midiStroke/ (macOS, open source)




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