Well, what it's useful for often depends on how the chords are assigned. I have a Microwriter Agenda, and it's quite difficult to type some of the characters like '{' that are rarely used in English (but which are common in programming). The one I built for my PERQ (hopefully) makes it easier to type some of the common programming symbols (at the expense of making some letters a little harder to type). The main advantage is that (a) they're very fast to use (once you learn to use them, which I haven't) and (b) they can be used 1-handed. The original idea (from Xerox IIRC) was that you used the chording pad with one hand and the mouse with the other. I want to try a mouse with a chording keypad built in, but I've not got round to making it. -tony