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Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

workmanlayout.org

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Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#31

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

1MachineElf wrote: post #20
klodolph wrote: post #13

An oversight in the layout, in my mind—the human hand is better at typing in certain directions… the hands very naturally roll towards the center, but it is less natural to rotate away from the center. This is… somewhat covered in the article under SHU… > It is much more efficient to ride the momentum of a single arm or wrist stroke and type a combo rather than just one key. Try ASDF versus FDSA on a QWERTY layout. A…

You had me with the FDSA example, but I wonder if that's because I'm also already biased towards Dvorak. Been typing with it since 2016 and loving it so far. Even "ls -l" doesn't bother me anymore - makes me wonder if QWERTY typists have under-developed pinky coordination.

After switching to Dvorak many years ago, I picked up the habits for a lot of shell commands to shift my right over two keys, so that my ring finger could hit the hyphen. `ls -l` is much more comfortable to type with middle-ring-middle than pinky-ring-pinky. I'm sure I've picked up other subtle shifts like that as well, and switching to a split layout keyboard also showed me just how much my hands crossed over for F, Y, and X.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#32

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

smabie wrote: post #17

> Try typing “The” with the T capitalized on Colemak and hopefully you’ll see what I mean. Try typing “The” with the T capitalized on Colemak and hopefully you’ll see what I mean Why is he shifting with his right hand instead of his left? It seems obvious, but maybe isn't: you should shift/ctrl with the opposite hand that is going to type the letter.

On Colemak, the T is on the left hand, so the right hand would be moving to the right to press shift, then moving to the left to press the H, the moving right again for E.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#34

Post by leotaku »

shirro wrote: post #23

A lot of keyboards optimize the wrong things at least as far as programming is concerned. All the optimizations seem to focus on letters but most of the time an editor or shell can auto complete keywords or identifiers. A ridiculous number of symbols seem to be a very long way from the home keys on weak fingers with modifiers required to access them. If I had to write huge amounts of plain prose and had RSI I think I…

My country uses the QWERTZ layout which has dedicated keys for German umlauts. I mostly type in English however, so I've bound "([{" to "öäü". I now type umlauts using "AltGr+oau".

It's definitely not a perfect solution, but it has worked well for me so far.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#35

Post by camgunz »

I had some pain in my right pinky and it made me realize tons of programming symbols and Enter are over there. I’ve been strongly considering remapping them somehow, though after wrapping my pinky and ring finger together for a couple weeks I was fine.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#36

Post by dmix »

lwb wrote: post #24

Looks very interesting, but re-learning how to type is so painful, not to mention devastating to my productivity at work, that I think I can only afford to do it once in a lifetime... I recently made the switch from QWERTY to Dvorak, during a 2 week period while I was in between jobs, and it was one of the most frustrating things I've ever done. Over a month later and I'm back up to a plodding 60 WPM (from a glorious…

I was curious about vim as well. I wonder if the defaults of vi are somehow optimized for QWERTY.

This thread convinced me to try switching to Dvorak but I'm a bit scared after reading your comment. It's not clear from your comment, did you switch back to QWERTY or are you still giving it a shot?

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#38

Post by Okkef »

Learning a new layout takes months of training. If you want to improve ergonomics, I would take the following steps;

1. Get as split keyboard for better shoulder posture (ultimate hacking keyboard)

2. Get a column staggered board instead of row staggered for better finger movement and more thumb keys (ergodox or iris keyboard)

3. Get rid of the num row and limit movement for fingers to one key in any direction using layers to simulate the missing keys (corne or kyria)

4. A sculpted and tented keyboard which allows the arm to untwist and is shaped like a dish to move keys closer to your fingers like the kinesis, dactyl, or Tightyl.

I got used to a kyria board in a week and it's helped hugely to improve my back pain. Never going back to a non split keyboard!

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#40

Post by stevev »

A few years ago I was stuck between workman, norman and colemak. I decided to go colemak for ease of transition.

Being a longtime qwerty typer, my hands came to favor a more left hand typing ratio.

I later realized colemak tends to be more right hand. My qwerty wpm rate went from avg 130 down to 80.

My hands feel more comfortable typing colemak for long durations compared to qwerty.

The placement of the letter H and E didn’t really bothered me. I’ve since picked up a modified version of colemak that fixes some of the short comings of colemak.

Maybe one day I’ll pick up workman due to having a more even left/right hand distribution.

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