Chording means pushing several keys or buttons simultaneously to achieve a result.
Musical keyboards
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Piano_C_Minor_7_Chord.jpg/220px-Piano_C_Minor_7_Chord.jpg)
In music, more than one key are pressed at a time to achieve more complex sounds, or chords.
Computer keyboards
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Computer_Keyboard_Simultaneous_Keys_Above.jpg/220px-Computer_Keyboard_Simultaneous_Keys_Above.jpg)
Chording, with a chorded keyboard or keyer allows one to produce as many characters as a QWERTY keyboard but with fewer keys and less motion per finger.
Pointers
Mouse chording allows a user to use a two-button mouse, trackball, or touchpad as if it where a three-button device. For example, in the Unix graphical user interface (known as X11), the middle button is used to paste text. Since Microsoft-type mice traditionally only had two buttons, users of Unix-type systems such as Linux and BSD chord the right and left buttons to paste text.
Multitouch chording
TipTapSpeech an application for the iPhone and iPad is a chord-based text entry solution for touch screen computing.[1]
A GKOS chording keyboard application development for iPhone was started on the GKOS Google Group[2] on May 25, 2009. The application for iPhone became available on May 8, 2010, and a similar application for Android on October 3, 2010. Thumbs are used to press the keys that are located towards the sides of the screen, either a single key or two keys simultaneously. The further development of GKOS has led to the ComboKey keyboard[3] that works better on smartphones. ComboKey also allows one-hand typing with the hand holding the device, generating combinations by occasional swipes to other keys.
Douglas Engelbart, Cherif Algreatly, Valerie Landau, Robert Stephenson, Evan Schaffer, and Eric Matsuno filed a patent in 2010 for a chorded solution for multitouch screens.[citation needed]
Minesweeper tactic
In Minesweeper, chording may refer to a tactic which is traditionally done by left-clicking and right-clicking at the same time on an uncovered square to uncover all eight adjacent squares if it has the correct number of flags.[4] In many newer versions of Minesweeper, chording can also be done by middle-clicking or by simply left-clicking.
References
- ^ TipTapSpeech Archived 2010-12-15 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ GKOS Group
- ^ ComboKey Plus
- ^ "Minesweeper Strategy". Authoritative Minesweeper. Retrieved 25 March 2022.