Comment by zaat
I can't find any viable alternative. Keyboard is much faster than those click and release interfaces. Keyboards also have repeat keys, when you press a character for a long time you can actually press and depress the shift key and see the change in the line of characters input. This is extremely useful feature in games, graphic design software and other applications.
Generation of keystroke based on the up event, beside been incompatible with repeating keys for long strokes, will slow down typing significantly, as it requires tracking timing pressing keys for longer duration. I'm pretty sure that this isn't only effect of me being used to track keypress timing on the way down, but an unavoidable result of the duration of the action.
Waiting for up event on contemporary GUI, when the contempt UI is a sluggish fit-to-nothing dirty touchscreen in a public kiosk is sensible. When you know an interface will yield more errors than intended input it is only sensible to assume that any input is a mistake unless the user is making an effort to validate it.
Keyboard repeat is only useful in ANSI terminal games on Unix, and games on some old 8 bit home computers that didn't have up and down events (Apple II+, ...).
A game written for an IBM PC and everything after that can know exactly which keys are being held down and when they are released by intercepting the "scan codes" (or abstract keyboard events in a GUI event loop).
All that is missing is synthesizer-like velocity and pressure info. :)
> will slow down typing significantly
Only for people who have to look at the screen. :)
The hunt-and-peck beginners who look at their fingers are not effect, and neither are those who can look at something else or close their eyes.
A serious concern affecting even those people is that using the release event could reorder things, causing mistakes. Like say if someone types the sequece wh (involving two hands) such that they release the w later than h.