61–70 of 128 posts
Seems a little strange to concentrate so much on keyboard layouts rather than switching to a split or ergonomic keyboard....
Besides, people also use laptops and may not want to swap their keyboard.
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?
I prefer "ls -lrta", since LRT is easier to type (Qwerty: POK). Having said that, on systems I used frequently, I have some aliases defined:
alias h=ls
alias hh=ls -l
alias lrt=ls -lrt
alias lrta=ls -lrta
alias aoeu='setxkbmap gb -option'
alias asdf='setxkbmap gb dvorak -option compose:menu,ctrl:swapcaps'
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There is Programmer Dvorak, which solvea the right hand's excessive use. Though the numbers do get funky.
I typed QERTY using 4 fingers, and still do. I took the opportunity to learn to type blind while learning Workman. During the process I changed a few keys around to make typing Dutch more convenient (mainly K and J IIRC)
It took me a few months to get any sort of speed, but now it's pretty effortless. I haven't checked my speed in ages, it's probably not fast by any means. I still tend to reverse the order of letters sometimes if I want to go fast.
My current keyboard has 4 layers and no number row. All numbers and punctuation are available on a separate layer. (shift, fn1, fn2) This took the most time to get used to, especially some of the rarely used punctuation.
I'd be happy to answer any questions of people who are considering switching.
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…
Using classic English language literature from a hundred years ago when advertising the keyboard for programmers is faulty thinking in my opinion. Why not use code for your testing? There is Programmer Dvorak, which solvea the right hand's excessive use. Though the numbers do get funky.
It's the other way around for natural language in comments, e-mail, blog posts, etc.
Given it's stated purpose, I was surprised not to see benchmarks on things like the Linux kernel source code.
Seems a little strange to concentrate so much on keyboard layouts rather than switching to a split or ergonomic keyboard....
I used to use a split keyboard but now I just stick with Apple's flat keyboards. I don't buy it anymore that they're more ergonomic. The "extra rest space" on my MS split keyboard I've actually found to be detrimental for me. Besides, people also use laptops and may not want to swap their keyboard.