Workman Keyboard Layout (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#221

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #135

jarnagin wrote: post #62

One thing that often goes unmentioned when I see discussions about these sorts of alternate layouts is that, particularly for programmers, the keyboard isn’t just a simple device for entering text, it’s the mechanism through which we interact with our computing environment, and most tooling is either specifically or unintentionally designed to enhance the productivity of people typing in QWERTY. Whether it’s simple c…

To be honest I never have any problem with that sort of thing with Colemak in terminals. The only issue I have is in games, where WASM is a religion.

As much as I hate rebinding WASD in every game ever (and no two games share anything like a similar remap tool; every game's settings are a unique snowflake), it does at least amuse me every time that Colemak's replacement is WARS. It seems more appropriate for games, it spells out a vaguely appropriate word and R for Reverse actually makes sense mnemonically. (Walk, Around, Reverse, Sideways ;)

Though nearly universal support of Xbox gamepads and made me more of a gamepad by default player, saving WASD remapping for rare cases.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#222

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

nwah1 wrote: post #194

Agree with Workman's criticism of Colemak, that the letters D and H are placed sub-optimally. I find moving O to reduce the use of the right pinky to be pointless, and self-contradictory since A is not moved, and remains under the left pinky. I also find the movement of C and V to be a non-starter for me. It looks like the Norman layout tries to address the DH issue of Colemak without messing up common shortcuts. Alt…

DH was an intentional compromise that Colemak took to increase QWERTY compatibility and Colemak documentation has always acknowledged that, so I respect it isn't perfect, given trade-offs, but as Workman acknowledges changing DH has a knock-on of changing a lot of things that I like about Colemak.

I think Colemak also better optimized some trigraphs over Workman's digraph focus.

That said, the difference between Workman/Norman/Colemak/Dvoarak is all rather "slight" compared to the respective distance between Qwerty and any of them, so some of these distinctions truly are "micro-optimizations". Most people would do better to learn any of them than keep with QWERTY whether or not they can tell which one micro-optimized better.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#223

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

stormdennis wrote: post #52

I used hunt and peck for years before learning to touch type. After four years of touch type I'm still fairly crap. If I try to speed up i commonly get the letter order wrong of two successive letters. I'm a lot better than hunt and peck but I'm kind of disappointed. Would it be a major job moving to Dvorak and can you expect big improvements? Also is it better for the keys programmers use that others don't use so mu…

> Would it be a major job moving to Dvorak and can you expect big improvements?

Not necessarily, it depends on the reasons you are still bad at touch typing on QWERTY. In some cases learning touch typing in QWERTY after years of hunt and peck bad habits simply shifts some of those bad habits directly into your touch typing behaviors. Maybe you still glance at the keyboard too often? Maybe you still rely on muscle memory from hunt and peck days to type a couple specific words and don't realize it?

A clean break to an entirely different keyboard layout and relearning touch typing on it can sometimes be exactly the hurdle you need to really learn touch typing, especially if you can do it during an opportunity for a full "cold turkey" switch on every keyboard you use daily. Don't rearrange the letters on the keys. If anything, do something drastic like remove the labels entirely.

Maybe not for everyone, and certainly there are a lot of comments in this thread with opinions on the matter that it is too much work and maybe not worth it. Anecdotally, I know that I had to cold turkey relearn touch typing on something that wasn't QWERTY to see most of the benefits of touch typing, and I'm glad that I did.

> Also is it better for the keys programmers use that others don't use so much like += etc

That's one of the criticisms that Colemak (and Workman/Norman) make of Dvorak that it moves too many punctuation keys. It's clear we are in a world where QWERTY won, and its punctuation keys are mostly fine where they are, with one very obvious exception (;/: should not be in the home row).

> If I try to speed up i commonly get the letter order wrong of two successive letters.

Touch typing doesn't make you "perfect" (and never will). Mistakes happen and shouldn't be seen as a failure in touch typing. One suggestion that Colemak makes and applies to all touch typing even if you stick to QWERTY (and others in threads here have suggested the same thing) is to rebind your Caps Lock key to Backspace. Mistakes happen, and are common enough. The Caps Lock is a much friendlier and easy to reach location than the usual Backspace location. Make mistakes quickly, but fix them just as quickly.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#224

Post by lmilcin » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 11:30 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #212

lmilcin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you are going to spend all the saved effort in ensuring you have the layout working everywhere. I am contractor, most of the time working on corporate PC. I use dvorak and it is already a huge PITA to explain to yet another corporate drone I need to be able to set up my own keyboard layout. Windows does not have Dvorak layout with polish accents so I have to either use my own driver or, more likely, write witho…

This is why I just bring my keyboard everywhere. I get everything I want without inconveniencing anyone else. I've considered building something extremely small like a Planck just for the extra portability.

I am currently building a keyboard from scratch. Will have matrix (ortholinear) layout and will be running my completely custom controller software so that I can play with the mappings and functionality to my heart's desire. In particular I was thinking about putting sd card slot where I could put steno dictionary and have steno built in the keyboard. Mainly because I typically work on some high sec corporate computers where I am unable to install any custom software.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#225

Post by xedrac » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

I used Workman for a year back in 2013. I even submitted it for inclusion into the Xorg project (perhaps a little prematurely). https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56998

Overall the layout felt great and relieved a lot of pain. I have two issues with it. The first one is that vim keybindings are terrible. This could easily be fixed by remapping keys in vim. The second issue is typing PO and OP sequences. This wasn't really noticeable until I hit around 60-70 wpm, then it stuck out like a sore thumb. If you don't typically type faster than that, this probably isn't an issue.

I have also typed Colemak and Dvorak (current layout) at a high level. Colemak was the the most painful for me as my index fingers just felt overloaded all the time. Dvorak was also a little painful on the right pinky until it got stronger. Dvorak was also the hardest of the three layouts to get used to.

All three are way better than Qwerty when it comes to typing comfort.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#226

Post by zetalemur » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 12:21 AM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #210

zetalemur wrote: post #145

Many years ago I too had pain in my wrists while doing lots of programming work. For me the game changer was using Vim and mapping ESC to jj in both the editor and the shell (via .inputrc). In fact I mostly use Vim because of the provided ergonomics, the fast editing capabilities are just the cherry on the cake. In my opinion the main culprit are modifier keys (e.g. by default the shell uses emacs bindings and you do…

Modifier keys suck on traditional keyboards. Modifier keys are great when they are put under your thumbs.

It's true, I don't have any problem with using SPACE via left thumb, but I have never encountered a layout or keyboard that let's me use the thumb for modifier keys. Do you have an example?

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#227

Post by thomastjeffery » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:42 AM UTC

lmilcin wrote: post #224

thomastjeffery wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I just bring my keyboard everywhere. I get everything I want without inconveniencing anyone else. I've considered building something extremely small like a Planck just for the extra portability.

I am currently building a keyboard from scratch. Will have matrix (ortholinear) layout and will be running my completely custom controller software so that I can play with the mappings and functionality to my heart's desire. In particular I was thinking about putting sd card slot where I could put steno dictionary and have steno built in the keyboard. Mainly because I typically work on some high sec corporate compute…

That's a neat idea.

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#228

Post by thomastjeffery » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:56 AM UTC

zetalemur wrote: post #226

thomastjeffery wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modifier keys suck on traditional keyboards. Modifier keys are great when they are put under your thumbs.

It's true, I don't have any problem with using SPACE via left thumb, but I have never encountered a layout or keyboard that let's me use the thumb for modifier keys. Do you have an example?

I'm using a keyboardio Model 01 (https://shop.keyboard.io/) right now.

The thumb (and thumb knuckle) keys are my favorite design point, but the entire design is excellent. They are out of stock, but the designs are open source, and there are a lot of other great DIY designs around.

The Ergodox has thumb clusters similar to the Kinesis Advantage. There is also the Dactyl, and many many more.

If you want to go down this rabbit hole, reddit is a good place to start: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMechKeyboards/

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#229

Post by toyg » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 8:20 AM UTC

Timpy wrote: post #149

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…

I've been experimenting with Xmodmap on Linux for this reason. I remapped my capslock key to a symbol modifier, and then put all of my symbols in different places based on ergonomics and easy to remember mnemonics. Here's a small sample: plus sign tilde at symbol delete exclamation mark vim movement After filling out the keyboard with mnemonics I found the few remaining gaps in the layer with two empty keys next to e…

This comment spurred me to do something similar with AutoHotkey on Windows. I had mapped capslock to ctrl but never actually got in the habit of using it, but as a fresh meta key is actually very useful.

I focused on the keys I find most annoying, because I have a short pinky.

Result: https://imgur.com/a/2XvKVa3

Script: https://pastebin.com/tJVw2nxg

I'll probably add some more as I get used to it, it would be cool to be able to avoid the awkward shift+num-row-key altogether. Guess there is a blog post to write later...

Re: Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

#230

Post by toyg » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #229

Timpy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been experimenting with Xmodmap on Linux for this reason. I remapped my capslock key to a symbol modifier, and then put all of my symbols in different places based on ergonomics and easy to remember mnemonics. Here's a small sample: plus sign tilde at symbol delete exclamation mark vim movement After filling out the keyboard with mnemonics I found the few remaining gaps in the layer with two empty keys next to e…

This comment spurred me to do something similar with AutoHotkey on Windows. I had mapped capslock to ctrl but never actually got in the habit of using it, but as a fresh meta key is actually very useful. I focused on the keys I find most annoying, because I have a short pinky. Result: https://imgur.com/a/2XvKVa3 Script: https://pastebin.com/tJVw2nxg I'll probably add some more as I get used to it, it would be cool to…

Forgot to say - those combinations are for Colemak. If you are using qwerty, replace the letters in "CapsLock & ::" lines with what you have on qwerty.