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Workman Keyboard layout

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Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#31

Post by flogic »

jdbernard wrote: post #6

> Typing ‘HE’ forced the hand to make a very unnatural sideways twisting motion from the wrist and then back again. Really? On my keyboard, I can simultaneously place my index finger on the Colemak position of H and my pinky on Shift without any movement of my wrist. I'm on a full-size keyboard with a tenkey and I have smallish hands. Personally, I've found that even on a qwerty keyboard the speed at which I type is…

Speed ties to "not awkward". Awkwardness is probably very important. Anytime something is awkward there is a decent chance it will trigger a mental interrupt. Personally, I've been cutting back on anything that adds mental load not related to the thing I'm actually trying to do.

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#32

Post by olakease »

yadakhov wrote: post #3

Changing keyboard layout isn't an option. I tried a few times and gave up.

I did it on holidays. Switched to dvorak for programmers 6 years ago. Never again pain in my wrist. I'm a vim user, that was a little difficult. Total time to be confortable with the change about 2 weeks. After that it became my main layout.

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#33

Post by benbenolson »

Great writeup, although it bothers me that he dismisses Dvorak so quickly. Although I've never personally used it, reading articles tells me that it's been regarded as the "best" layout for many use cases for a very long time. He said that he typed one command, `ls -latr`, shook his head and dismissed it. Can anyone clarify as to why?

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#34

Post by pklausler »

pklausler wrote: post #24

20 years ago or so, I ran an evolutionary algorithm that permuted keys in a layout, evaluated them against a corpus of English texts from Project Gutenberg and the Linux kernel sources, and a home-grown cost function that penalized finger motion and especially double-hits by the same finger. The best layouts all had the property that the vowels were on the home row under the left hand, and the common consonants were…

Besides sticking with Dvorak's keyboard layout, the best thing I ever did for my comfort and productivity was to write a text editor that laid its commands out on the keyboard sensibly. Both vi and emacs use designs chosen for ease of recall, based on associations between letters and verbs, not for physical ease of use (apart from vi's HJKL). My editor, aoeui, uses right-hand home and upper rows for navigation by various units; the FDB central column of Dvorak for copy, delete, and paste/swap; and a key on the bottom right-hand row for selection. The left hand's job is basically to hold down the control key and do rare things like file operations.

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#35

Post by codemonkeymike »

I have tried both Workman and Colemak. I first tried Workman but ran into the issue of that on my phone and on other peoples laptops the layout was unavailable. So I moved to Colemak and haven't looked back, and have now been using it for about 3 months. Both are nice layouts, I dont see any major benefit from switching between each except for layout support on operating systems.

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#36

Post by drdaeman »

pklausler wrote: post #28
jdbernard wrote: post #6

> Typing ‘HE’ forced the hand to make a very unnatural sideways twisting motion from the wrist and then back again. Really? On my keyboard, I can simultaneously place my index finger on the Colemak position of H and my pinky on Shift without any movement of my wrist. I'm on a full-size keyboard with a tenkey and I have smallish hands. Personally, I've found that even on a qwerty keyboard the speed at which I type is…

It's not about speed, it's about comfort, at least for me.

I've only learned Dvorak because my wrists started to hurt.

With QWERTY, I had a quite odd typing style that had evolved from 2-fingers hunt-and-peck but never got to proper 10-finger typing. This odd style wasn't slow, and I hadn't to look at the keyboard, but my hands used to float all across the keyboard in weird motions, and I suspected it had contributed to my wrist pains.

I wasn't able to force myself to learn a proper QWERTY typing - the decades-old muscle memory was a seemingly impenetrable barrier for me. However, a completely different layout (Dvorak) did the trick - thanks to ABCD, after a 2 weeks of "aaaaaaargh I can't type anything, it's really really irritating" hell, I had learned to type acceptably fast, and what's important - with my hands remaining fairly stationary.

I don't know if this was another layout, or just a pair of weeks of rest, or that was a pure coincidence, but the pains were gone (haven't had any severe since then) and I enjoy a proper typing style. There was some speed improvement, of course, but this isn't something I care about.

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#37

Post by protomyth »

speps wrote: post #9
jessedhillon wrote: post #5

I like seeing someone willing to rethink base assumptions, and to follow that thinking all the way to a brand new layout. However, I'm surprised to see that, even in a layout intended for programming, parentheses and brackets are placed as inconveniently as they ever are. Programming might only be 25-40% of my typing, but it's the most painful/annoying usage of the keyboard that I have -- far out of proportion with t…

> UPDATE: Workman-P is now available. Workman-P is Workman for Programmers. In Workman-P, the top-row numbers and symbols have been switched as well as the brace and brackets. It is great for programmers as well as system administrators.

I'm a bit skeptical of that change for keyboards I don't have a numeric keypad. I think I type more numbers while programming than symbols.

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#38

Post by pklausler »

benbenolson wrote: post #33

Great writeup, although it bothers me that he dismisses Dvorak so quickly. Although I've never personally used it, reading articles tells me that it's been regarded as the "best" layout for many use cases for a very long time. He said that he typed one command, `ls -latr`, shook his head and dismissed it. Can anyone clarify as to why?

That particular sequence uses the right-hand pinky finger a lot. I think 'L' and '-' would be better on Dvorak if they were swapped. But throwing out the whole layout because of one UNIX shell command seems to me like he was looking for a justification. Dvorak gets all the basics right and can be found everywhere; to me, the differences with other ergonomic layouts are probably less than the error of measurement.

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#39

Post by pklausler »

htns wrote: post #19

I too found Colemak lacking. IMO it's because the most relevant keyboard layout metrics are 1) how well words break down into same hand "finger rolls", which help typing accuracy and to lesser extend speed 2) how often the same finger has to type multiple characters in succession 3) how often the same hand has to reach for the more awkward middle keys (y and b in qwerty) while also doing something with the middle fin…

whoa, you map Caps Lock to backspace, not control?

Re: Workman Keyboard layout

#40

Post by lambda »

Also note the White Keyboard Layout, which was released recently as a reaction to the Workman layout due to some concerns about the optimizaiton parameters.

https://github.com/mw8/white_keyboard_layout

He defined a somewhat different set of scoring, then ran a simulated annealing algorithm to find a layout that optimized that score, then did a few manual tweaks for consistency and learnability. The code for the optimization is available, so you can define your own scoring and run it yourself.

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