I would have appreciated it if the simulations could be run against source code in different languages. That would be informative.
Workman Keyboard layout
51–60 of 128 posts
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#52Are there keyboard layouts based on other languages? or even programming languages?
For ideographic languages all kinds of systems exist, otherwise it's mostly minor variatons of QWERTY, plus putting some accented/non-standard letters somewher. Germany has QWERTZ while France has AZERTY for some kind of reason (a special hate for the letter 'a'?).
As for programming languages, it's quite common for lisp programmers to make the parens more accessible. And of course, there's the infamous APL keyboard.
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#53I 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.
I tried Dvorak and Colemak. I couldn't get used to Dovrak's emphasis on hand alternation, so about 4 years ago I tried Colemak and I continue using it today, it's good enough and feels more comfortable than Qwerty. And unlike what the article says, I find it super easy to type 'he' or 'the' on colemak. It's good that almost every Linux distibution includes it. On Windows I use the portable autohotkey version.
I feel you on the 'he' argument, it may be because I have relatively large hands or it really isn't an issue for some people. Dvorak seems to be better for bursts of speed on some words while tying you up on other words, where in Colemak I type at a constant speed for most words.
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#5420 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 var…
The Wordstar diamond was quite common at a time, and definitely not mnemonic.
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
whoa, you map Caps Lock to backspace , not control?
Yes, since capslock+a is awkward to press. Altgr + any key can be hit without strain, at least if you have a keyboard that doesn't place altgr too far to the right.
Got it. Agree that caps lock + A is hard; I didn't assign a command meaning to ^A in my editor design for that reason (at first) and because ^A is the default escape sequence in 'screen'.
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#5620 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…
The critical part is what you base your evaluation on. As written in the article, some think same-hand sequences are good, others think they are bad. Some consider the home row the place to by, while others take a broader look at easy to reach places.
If you change your evaluation criteria you might find Workman outperforms Dvorak, or the other way around.
Personally, I can only say I'm happy with Workman after over a year.
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#57Great 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.
Yup.
alias ao='ls'
alias aoe='ls -l'
alias aou='ls -a'
alias aoeu='ls -la'
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#58I would comment on the original blog, but comments are closed.
In the last comparison, the results are given as QWERTY = 16653m and Workman = 88027m. This suggests that QWERTY is significantly better!
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#59Are there keyboard layouts based on other languages? or even programming languages?
I use a variation of workman that moves a few uncommon letters around. I can't even remember which, but my fingers know. Mainly J and K are used a lot more in Dutch than in English IIRC. There are tools out there to evaluate a layout based on a corpus. I remember downloading some Dutch text from Guttenberg to validate my layout.
Re: Workman Keyboard layout
#60Great 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.
Yeah, it does seem like that command is rather arbitrarily chosen. Most people don't type `ls -latr` over and over again.