Mac Key Limit

[David Bayl]

Hi. I'm new to plover somewhat. Originally I was using it on Windows OS but today tried putting it on my mac. Then comes the annoyance: all strokes using up to six keys seem to work just fine, but more than six keys and it just doesn't respond. (I point out again it's not a falsely advertised NKRO keyboard. It's been testing and works fine no matter how many keys on the Windows machine.)

For example, TKPRES translates to 'depress' as expected, but stroking STKAOEUR doesn't translate to "desire" but just translates as STKAO*E.

Similar anomalies happen with other combinations, but it seems 1--6 keys works fine but 7 keys or more and the problem rears its ugly head. 

Has anyone else discovered this problem? Any suggestions on a fix?

I'm using Plover 3.1.1 on Mac OS Big Sur 11.2.1

[jo...@qualdan.com]

It's a known issue that some NKRO keyboards are not NKRO on Mac, yeah. :-(

The default USB keyboard protocol only supports pressing 6 keys at once. So NKRO keyboards have to define a custom protocol, or pretend to be multiple keyboards, or something. And Mac OS seems to not like some of the methods (I don't know which ones: it's nearly impossible to find info about this stuff). Plover's Supported Hardware page has some keyboards listed which people *have* found to work on Mac, and you might add your keyboard to the list so others know that it doesn't, but unfortunately I don't know that there's a fix.

https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Supported-Hardware#keyboards

--Josh

[David Bayl]

Well, that sucks. But you answered my question 100%. Thanks very much for that. Back to the PC I go.