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One of the comments on the youtube video says "I need an analog carriage return".

Now that would be cool. Having a physical bell ding every time you hit enter, like an old typewriter!

Edit: I'm aware that typewriters ding before you get to the end, but that would be much harder to implement than just doing it when you hit enter, which would be a close representation. :P



On a typewriter the bell rings before you return the carriage. (By pushing it – if it's manual, there's no such thing as ‘hitting enter’.) It happens a few characters before the end of the line, as a warning that you should go to the next line after the current word, or if it's a long word, think about hyphenation.

Oh, and the typewriters used to perform that song made famous by Jerry Lewis are hacked so the bell can be triggered ad lib — but the sheet music still says to do it before pushing the lever :)


There's no free score of Anderson's "Typewriter" to be found--it's still under copyright--but there's a YouTube with a condensed score:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIdqJExuFMI

When we preformed this in college orchestra, a percussionist made the "ding" separately from the typewriter and I think it was noted in the score for triangle IIRC.


I know I was just trying to get close to the typewriter experience. :)


I assumed as much, just couldn't stop myself from writing a clarification anyway in case some younger readers would get confused.

Initially I found the idea to make it more authentic more fun, but now that you've mentioned ease of implementation — yeah, it wouldn't be that much fun that I could be arsed to, say, patch a terminal emulator.

A text editor plug-in would be easier, though. Get a subtle ding when a line of code is about to get too long, instead of dreading the approaching cliff of a strict ruler :)

Btw., this is quite neat, too: https://youtu.be/qb43-hn_-_c (The download link for the sound pack in the video description still works!)


There was a similar thread about typewriter emulators a while ago, and I found this one online:

https://uniqcode.com/typewriter/

It is an accurate simulator with all the sounds and quirks of using a real typewriter. All it's missing is the view of the ribbon moving up and down, and of course the letters hitting the paper.


I think your memory is confused. It was the other way around.

The bell was a signal that you were running out of space and it was time to return the carriage.


Wire up your editor to trigger the USB bell when the cursor reaches the floor(0.95N)th column?




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