surface progression
This morning, I took the Surface and the numeric keypad I’m experimenting with for all my hotkeys out to the place I usually get breakfast. Morsel is a crowded little place, where I often end up sitting at the counter with someone next to me enjoying another of their fabulous biscuits.
In the line, I decided what file I wanted to work on. I opened up the Surface and loaded it into Illustrator. Once I sat down, I opened it up again and plopped the keypad down next to it, and got a little bit of progress on the drawing while waiting for my food.
I am delighted by how easy and transparent this was compared to opening up Illustrator on my Air. Honestly, I would never do that there - there’s just not enough space for a computer and a Wacom tablet there, and taking the pen/pen stand/cable out of my bag and setting it all up takes too damn long. But the Surface? Take the keypad from my pocket, turn it on. Open the Surface’s case up and turn it on. Pluck the stylus from its magnetic mount and I’m ready to go; “drawing” is now an option to fill a lot of spaces in my life where I’d normally be scrolling through Twitter or otherwise mindlessly grazing on short-attention-span content. And that feels really good.
A while back I’d heard that Sergio Aragones draws his comics on typing paper, so he can whip out a clipboard and work on them wherever the hell he is, even in an airplane seat, and this has been a goal for me for years. The Surface is not quite there; I have to be out of the sun to use it. But I can just pick it up, slip the numpad in my pocket along with keys and phone, and wander out a short distance almost as easily as I can go out with a sketchbook and a couple of pens. In the case I got for it, it’s got pretty much the same heft as a thick sketchbook would have.
Current support software loadout:
AutoHotkey - to do most of the work for remapping the keypad into my Illustrator Shortcut Pad
Interception - a little program that can remap keys on particular bluetooth keyboards, I’m using this to swap control and Windows on just my external keyboard so the stylus’ eraser button works, and to remap ‘enter’ from only the numeric pad into an unused keycode, for further processing in AutoHotKey. I got it from a post on the AHK forums.
I’d tried to use an AHK library to do the “remap a key on just one keyboard” stuff, but it’s super complicated and I ended up wasting a whole day feeling like I was reimplementing parts of AHK in itself, so I switched to this much simpler to configure second program.
RadialMenus - for creating a custom toolbar with about 50 buttons that contains every single hotkey I regularly press while using Illustrator. Which will probably be cut down somewhat once I really get the keypad configured to my liking.
(Also: MalwareBytes, f.lux, the Adobe installer, Chrome, and T:ME Tile. And of course Illustrator and Evernote.)
I’m ordering a slightly larger numpad, because I feel like I have a few too many shortcuts I want instantly available. I could probably fit things on the little one I got by doing a bunch of AHK stuff to make chords happen, but I feel like a few more keys would make it a lot easier to use.
I’ll probably post all my configuration for these tools in a few days, once I start to feel like they’re usable. Right now the keypad’s only about halfway there, and I have to use onscreen stuff a lot more than I’d like.
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.