> With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.

I had an old Frigidaire-made range a few years ago with a timer. It was a fairly basic thing; the only fanciful feature it had was a clock with a timer, a knob, and a VFD. No buttons at all; the mode was set by the direction of the initial turn. (The rest of the machine also worked with knobs: Simmerstats for the burners, and mode-select and thermostat knobs for the oven, with no computerization for those bits at all.)

It worked great. The rotary encoder was the most responsive I've ever used and did not appear to miss any steps. The velocity ramps were fantastic, and the knob was small in diameter and thereby easy to turn fast.

I could set a timer approximately with a quick, singular flick of my fingers, which was plenty good enough for most of my cooking. Setting a timer for about 20 or 30 minutes (or an hour, or whatever) was simple.

If I wanted to be precise, that was also simple: Get to the right neighborhood with a clockwise flick, and then just turn the dial a bit slower to work in tighter precision (down to 1 minute per encoder stop).

It takes a lot of words to describe, but it was intuitive AF in use.

The clock didn't drift much over time (it was synchronized to line frequency -- not perfect anymore, but pretty good).

Walltime was easy to set (for DST buggery or power outage), too: Same knob, still no buttons. Same excellent acceleration ramps. Just start with an anticlockwise flick, and it's setting the clock instead of the timer.

(Screw it up by twisting it the wrong way on initial rotation? It didn't matter much because the cost of resetting the clock was very, very low and the action of it felt like a pleasant release from modern human interface chicanery)

---

Clock on present-day oven also works, but it's crap. Pick a mode with a button. Set digits by holding or tapping up or down buttons. Accept input digits by pressing another button.

But tapping always only goes in 1-minute steps, which sounds nice except: The debounce is bad and it misses rapid taps. And holding it sounds nice, except: It always overshoots, by a lot -- the acceleration ramps are, to put it as kindly as I can, sadistic.

Setting the clock is miserable. The fastest and least-annoying way to adjust for DST is to mash the button 60 times at the right cadence: Too fast, and it misses inputs.

Too slow and it takes long enough that the motivation is to try the sadistic button-hold acceleration again (which will be uniformly punished by sending it even further away from the target than where it started).

I'd put black tape over the display (like a VCR from the 1980s) and forget about it, but: In a curse of integration-at-every-expense, this display is also used to set the temperature for the oven and I need that function.

Quasi-Logarithmic Kitchen Timer