Alt Speccy Keyboard

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum (1982) ran its BASIC interpreter on as little as 16KB of RAM, so it never made you type keywords like PRINT or GO TO letter by letter. Every keyword lived on a single keystroke: with the cursor in its default keyword-entry mode, pressing a key such as P dropped the whole word PRINT onto the line in one press, and a second Extended Mode (reached with a shift combination) mapped that same key to another keyword printed on the same keycap, such as PEEK. Whatever you typed wasn't even stored as text — the interpreter converted each keyword into a single-byte token to save precious memory, which is also why the real machine could only ever delete a keyword whole, never one letter at a time.

This tool started as a thought experiment: real hardware only ever gave each key at most two fixed keyword slots (a plain keypress and Extended Mode), so most letters could reach one or two keywords at best and everything else had to be typed out longhand. What if a single key could instead cycle through everything that letter had to offer? Alt+letter cycling is that alternative, built to see how it would actually feel to use: hold Alt and tap a letter to step through that letter's whole keyword set — the L key alone reaching LOAD, LET, LEN, LINE, LIST, LLIST, LPRINT and LN — starting with the most useful one, then press Space to lock it in. There's nothing about the Spectrum's keyboard or CPU that would have stopped this working on the real machine; the only genuine obstacle to shipping it would have been squeezing the extra keyword tables and cycling logic into whatever room was left in the already-packed 16KB ROM.

And just like the real machine, once a keyword is entered here it's a single token rather than letters: Backspace/Delete always remove it whole. Compose a line below, press Enter to commit it to the program, and use F2 or a double-click to bring any line back for editing.