Alnasl is Arabic for "the point," marking the arrowhead at the tip of Sagittarius's bow — a fitting name for a tool that practices the arrow-shaped mouse cursor built into CharaChorder 3D devices.
Alnilam continues the Alnitak naming scheme: CharaChorder Lite was the company's second device, released after the CharaChorder One, so this Lite-focused practice tool took the next star along Orion's belt from Alnitak — Alnilam.
The name started as a pun on "three" — the tool lets you practice three things at once, and the Chinese character 參 (also read "san," meaning three) led to the working title `typing-san`. That was too obscure for anyone outside Chinese or Japanese, so Tangent looked for a proper star instead and found Alnitak, the first star of the "參宿" (Three Stars) mansion in Chinese astronomy. The wordplay still works: 參 can mean "study," 宿 "place," and 一 "one," reading loosely as a Study Place for CharaChorder One. Alnitak's main star being a blue supergiant also became the project's blue theme color.
Arcturus carries its own story about elapsed time: its light was used to trigger the opening ceremony of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, chosen because the star's light was believed to have left Arcturus around 1893 — the year of the previous Chicago World's Fair, roughly 40 years earlier. That theme of light marking the passage of decades made it a fitting name for a tool that visualizes a life in weeks.
Capella is the brightest star in Auriga, the Charioteer — a constellation named for a driver who guides the way. That image of being led step by step made it a fitting name for a tutorial site walking users through CharaChorder 3D devices.
Castor is a classic calibration and benchmark target in astronomical observation, web star charts, and telescope alignment tools — a star tied to measuring things at their true scale, which mirrors what this viewer does: showing a CharaChorder device at its real, physical size. Castor is also half of the Gemini twins, echoing the tool's own twin mapping — projecting the real, physical input device onto its virtual counterpart on screen.
Chara's name turned up while looking for a star that echoed Alnitak's naming style: it's the actual star β Canum Venaticorum, and its name also happens to be a substring of "CharaChorder" — a tidy double meaning for a chord practice tool. Following the same logic as Alnitak's theme color, Chara being a G-type main-sequence star gave this project its yellow theme.
Formosa is a real star: it's the official name Taiwan gave to HD 100655 through the IAU's 2019 NameExoWorlds campaign, held to mark the IAU's 100th anniversary. Formosa is the old Portuguese/Latin name for Taiwan, meaning "beautiful island," and Bopomofo (Zhuyin) is itself a script closely tied to Taiwan — making this the tightest name-to-theme connection among these projects.
Mira is the archetypal variable star, its brightness rising and falling over time — and astronomers track stars like it with a light curve, brightness plotted against time. This app plots a learning curve, WPM against days, the same structure in a different domain. Mira was also the first variable star ever discovered, in 1596, and lent its name to an entire class of variable stars (Mira variables) — the original example of recording change as a curve. Its name is Latin for "wonderful."
Sirius comes from the Greek seirios, "scorching" or "glowing," and it's the brightest star in the night sky — a fitting name for a tool that lights up the keys you press in real time.