modelm

A Mechanical keyboard audio simulator for your keyboard written in Rust.

Get yourself clickity-clacking.

Inspired by the IBM Model M Keyboard and a disproportionate love of clicky keyboards over non clicky keyboards, this is a simple program to simulate the Model M by providing audible keystroke feedback.

Features

To provide audible feedback for your keystrokes, modelm hooks into OSX Quartz Events (on OSX) or your /dev/input keyboard device and must be run as root(or from a terminal with accessibility features enabled on OSX).

Stereo sounds - Keys on the left sound like keys on the left. Keys on the right sound like Keys on the right.
Custom resource loading - You can pick your favorite clickity-clacks. Just point modelm to a directory with sound bites and a config file.

Requirements

Install OpenAL audio dependency.

OSX

brew update
brew install openal-soft libsndfile

Debian/Ubuntu

apt-get update
apt-get install libopenal-dev libsndfile1-dev

Arch

You may also need pulseaudio as shown

pacman -S openal libsndfile pulseaudio-alsa

Installation

Running a pre-compiled binary

To run the compiled binary, download the latest release and simply run the following from within the extracted tarball

./modelm -d resources/modelm

Installation from source

First, install Rust and Cargo.

git clone https://github.com/millerjs/modelm.git
cd modelm
cargo run --release

Usage

# To specify custom clickity clacks:
sudo ./modelm -d path/to/clacks

# To make the key gradient from left to right more dramatic
sudo ./modelm -x 5.0

# Or less dramatic
sudo ./modelm -x 0.5

# Or reverse because you have your headphones on backward, silly
sudo ./modelm -x'-1'

Note: Linux usage

Currently, modelm defaults to reading from /dev/input/event0, but you can specify which event device to read at runtimefrom by setting the MODELM_INPUT_DEVICE environment variable to a new path.

Help output

modelm 0.3.0
Joshua Miller <jsmiller@uchicago.edu>
Turns your computer into a mechanical keyboard emulator!

USAGE:
	modelm [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
    -v, --debug      Debug output
    -h, --help       Prints help information
        --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -c, --config <CONFIG>     Specify the config to parse click options from
    -d, --directory <DIR>     Specify the directory to load click sounds from
    -V, --volume <VOLUME>     Adjust the keyboard volume in range [0.0, 1.0]
    -x, --x-scale <XSCALE>    Specify the pan amount for the positional sound of clicks. A decimal (default: 1.0).  The larger the value, the further apart the clicks will sound. A value of 0 turns off positional sound. A value < 0 reverses the directionality.

Example config file

switches:

  ## enter
  -  keycode_regex: '36'
     keydown_paths:
       - enter_down_1.wav
       - enter_down_2.wav

     keyup_paths:
       - enter_up_1.wav
       - enter_up_2.wav

  ## all other keys
  -  keycode_regex: '\d+'
     keydown_paths:
       - down_1.wav
       - down_2.wav

     keyup_paths:
       - up_1.wav
       - up_2.wav

Options

You can pass options through cargo with a --, e.g. to change the volume:

sudo cargo run --release -- -V 0.5

Credits

Currently ships with IBM sounds and HHKB Pro 2 Topre sounds.