Chorded Keyboard
Chorded Keyboard
[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk, typing on his keyboard as shown by small lines over one hand, while looking at the screen of his stationary computer. The screen is on a raised platform on his desk. Lyrical text is written upon each scene, presumably what Cueball is typing.] I heard there was a secret chord That David pressed and it typed a word
[A closeup on Cueball in a slim panel. We see him from the waist up, with his hands on the keyboard just beneath the panels frame.] But you don't use a chorded keyboard, do you
[Same setting as in the first panel, except Cueball's arms have moved and there are movement lines above and below his arms.] It goes like this, <control> and <shift> The other hand hits H and <left>
[Slimmer panel but same setting as in the first panel, again the arms have moved a bit, with movement lines above them. The final written word of text is marked as arising directly from the computer.] And all at once it types out Computer: Hallelujah

This strip is a parody of the first verse (and in the title text, the end of the last verse) of Leonard Cohen 's " Hallelujah ", which has become a distinctive and popular song of which covers and versions exist. Written as a ballad , it is partly based upon the allegory of a mystical musical chord of several musical notes, that the words and tune both describe and illustrate by example.
Here is the verse from the song (see the lyrics here ):
Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do ya? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing "Hallelujah"
Cueball is filking upon this theme, but in his case he has somehow set up his computer so that, upon pressing a certain combination of multiple keys on his keyboard, the system will automatically type out the word "hallelujah" (xkcd's all-caps lettering makes it unclear how the word is capitalized). In his description of the process, in both the comic proper and the title text, he uses adapted lyrics that again both describe and illustrate by example. Most of the initial lyrics are floating 'thoughts'. The punchline "hallelujah", however, is 'spoken' out of his computer monitor - typical of how on-screen text is indirectly shown in this comic series. It partially continues as a song parody through the title text but then trails off into a typical computer-complaint that he perhaps may often have cause to make .
The original lyrics rely upon typically nuanced rhymes, such as "do you" (or "do ya'") with "Hallelujah", and "fifth" with "lift", but fairly reliably rhymes "chord" with "Lord". In Randall 's version, it starts with "chord" and "word" which look like they should rhyme, but would be /kɔɹd/ vs. /wɝd/ in an typical US accent. Similarly "shift" and "left" might be considered not a perfect rhyme when read as prose, but should still be possible to meaningfully sing.
Technically, a chorded keyboard is one in which (nearly) all inputs are made by simultaneous pressing of a given combination of a limited number of keys, such as a literal handful of non-alphabetic keys, that the user learns to combine to represent the key-presses of more standard keyboards or (in some cases) signify entire phonemes or words. The workings of such a keyboard tends to be handled internally, sending to the computer the signal(s) that would have been sent from its larger cousin.
A big thing among Xennial hackers like Randall and his original audience was customising keyboard uses. The linux operating system was originally designed and used for personal customisation, and people move their configurations from system to system, often customising how things respond to such a degree that other users struggle to make use of their system at all. The first major two text editors, vim and emacs, were composed of different camps of how to efficiently type. The emacs camp believed it was more effective to hit many keys at once to accomplish a large task, but both editors were designed to be highly customisable. It's erroneously believed that the traditional qwerty keyboard was specifically designed to make typing inefficient so as to reduce engineering burden in making old typewriters responsive and reliable. Given the prevalence of them, it has been common among hackers to remap a keyboard to something they may personally consider more efficient, such as to use a dvorak layout layout rather than a qwerty layout. Chorded configurations are an order of magnitude more efficient than the dvorak layout, but are more complex to configure because the result is not at all a one-to-one mapping. The traditional court reporting device is a chorded keyboard, to keep up with human speech.
Using a combination of normally single-use keys (the 'H' and a cursor) with others, including modifiers ('shift' and 'control'), i.e. 'chording' with his keyboard, is a kind of key combination found traditionally in emacs and operating system commands (such as pressing ctrl+alt+c, to copy a selection to clipboard). The ballad then comes across as an ode to system customisation and the practice of user-interface hacking, wherein a computer user knows how to rebuild their interface in almost any way they desire.
The chording example goes beyond mainstream use (shift and an alphabetic character changes the character case, whilst ctrl and a character may initiate an editing command) or mainstream multi-modifier combinations (ctrl, alt and the 'e' may result in the 'é', where the keyboard does not otherwise support it) and even goes beyond emacs-like command sequences which are generally software-specific. It seems likely that a setup such as that depicted in this comic is handled within the computer, either defined within the OS (all mainstream desktop operating systems support alternative keyboard mapping and customisable key-combinations, often for accessibility and international keyboard support), or (as is often the case with specialist configurable gaming keyboards) via the driver installed to mediate such esoteric keyboard combinations as the user has predefined for themselves.
Cueball's combination-keypress may in fact be better termed a 'macro', in some contexts. The single event, somehow triggered by this particular simultaneous multi-key input, invokes the injection of a pre-specified sequence of standard characters into the appropriate text-buffer/-stream, in lieu of manual per-character input.
The title text spoofs the last verse of the (original) song, with "Hallelujah" being replaced by Cueball trailing off musing about having apparently lost the backup of his keyboard configuration, implying that he ended up in a position where he would want to restore said backup (for instance, having tampered with it to the point he is no longer capable of operating the keyboard efficiently, if at all).
Here is the original verse, where the title text spoofs the last three lines:
I did my best, it wasn't much I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya And even though it all went wrong I'll stand before the lord of song With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah
As added irony, while in the original that verse is hopeful, with the singer being thankful for experiencing joy even from a relationship that ultimately failed, contrarily in the alt text Cueball is apparently expressing regret. Or, if taken literally, it could instead imply that God himself is questioning Cueball about his tampering with software, which could fit with the running gag of Cueball's (often self-inflicted) computer problems being hyperbolically atrocious .
When one modifies one's keyboard config, it can make the system seem unusable (or at least highly unexpected) to things like a boss, a spouse, or an automated maintenance system. When an error is made somewhere in the process, it can make the system seem unusable to the very person who made the changes, making it hard to change them back.
[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk, typing on his keyboard as shown by small lines over one hand, while looking at the screen of his stationary computer. The screen is on a raised platform on his desk. Lyrical text is written upon each scene, presumably what Cueball is typing.] I heard there was a secret chord That David pressed and it typed a word
[A closeup on Cueball in a slim panel. We see him from the waist up, with his hands on the keyboard just beneath the panels frame.] But you don't use a chorded keyboard, do you
[Same setting as in the first panel, except Cueball's arms have moved and there are movement lines above and below his arms.] It goes like this, <control> and <shift> The other hand hits H and <left>
[Slimmer panel but same setting as in the first panel, again the arms have moved a bit, with movement lines above them. The final written word of text is marked as arising directly from the computer.] And all at once it types out Computer: Hallelujah
