I was asked a question today on behalf of a person
who is contemplating a slate Tablet PC. The person in question is a
developer that does lots of coding in C++. They wanted to know how it
would be possible to send Ctrl-C to the IDE using a slate.
There are three main ways to do this.
1) Dock
your slate. When a slate is docked you have a keyboard and mouse and
often a nice big screen. In this state using a slate (or any other laptop
or tablet docked) is just like using a desktop PC.
2) Using
the Onscreen Keyboard in the Tablet Input Panel it is possible to tap the Ctrl
key, then the C key. The Control key (as well as shift and alt) is a
sticky key – meaning it stays pressed on the onscreen keyboard until
after you hit the next key. It works but it is slow.
3) This
is the way I would do it. Use StrokeIt (as previously
blogged about here) to create a new gesture for the IDE application.
For instance if it was me I would assign ‘Reversed C’ as the
gesture so it is easy to remember (‘C’ is by default a global
gesture to close the current window – you can change this but I find it
handy). You can then assign an action to this gesture. Using the
Hotkeys feature you could assign ‘Ctrl-C’. If you did this
then holding down the button on the stylus and drawing a backwards C while in
the IDE application would send Ctrl-C to the application.