Heh, I just visualized my laptop keyboard transposed onto an 88 key piano, and then tried to imagine what a typical vim session would sound like on it...

Obviously Emacs sessions would sound better, as Emacs already is set up to use chords...

Funny :)

As long as you hit middle C1 on every chord regardless of whether or not it's a duff chord or not...

At least with vi, you can play one fingered and make an acceptable tune ;)

Sure Douglas Hofstadter could write a book about that...

This must be done.

Many MIDI virtual keyboard apps provide a mapping to the PC keyboard. Install one of those, (e.g. apt-get install vkeybd), plus a softsynth (e.g. ZynAddSubFX). Done.

> hang on, like a piano

Starbucks is about to get a lot noisier. :)

I think tones in our hearing range would be a bad idea. From what I remember of my music theory class, our brains (through either nature or nurture) don't like discordant sounds like that for a long time. In fact, I believe it's been used as a torture device in the past, although I'm guessing it wasn't just a weird jumble of notes in that case.

I don't think I'd be very good at programming in any case.

Click noises have no real tone character so could probably work. My keyboard already makes those anyway.

True, but as you alluded to yourself, those aren't really 'tones'. The parent was talking about a keyboard that sounded like a piano.