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An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

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21–30 of 147 posts

Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

#22
After having tried Dvorak for a couple of days (weeks?) a couple years back, I found my peace with the american default layout. Typing on dvorak was fun, and the learning process was really fun, too - fighting two decades of muscle memory was quite the experience.

But at some point I realized that I now have to adapt all the bindings - without a solution to this, I'm not willing to try out different stuff. I need vi to work out of the box, especially because I also use the vi-bindings in tmux, zsh and firefox. Sigh.

Looks really interesting though.

Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

#23
post #9

Dvorak touchtyper since 2010 is here ^_^ I appreciate any attempts to make August Dvorak's work even better. For example, that claster of wovels is not AI's work but Dvorak's. BTW there is one strange claim from my POW: > QWERTY - 0% (baseline) > Dvorak - +77% > Colemak - +84% > Workman - +101% > Halmak - +134% If author considers Colemak and Workman more efficient than Dvorak, I should not even to give this layout a…

> 7531902468

I've been using this (almost) and had forgotten it was from the programmer's Dvorak, but surely it must be:

7531980246

Surely programmers start counting from 0 and use 0 more often than 8.

Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

#24
post #13
post #2

Not as good as this! https://www.charachorder.com/ 500wpm apparently!

Is this for real? To me, it looks way too error prone (3D movement per key... wat) and english only. I honestly wondered whether it was a stunt from Cards Against Humanity or The Onion. But if not, you got me curious.

I know what you mean.. but apparently you can buy one! I haven't, so I can't verify it.

And there seem to be training manuals etc.

Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

#25
i rarely find myself in a situation where my typing speed on a regular layout is the limiting factor for input speed. When coding I don't type a lot and i'd likely get the same input speed on any reasonable layout after a while and when typing normal text i'm much more bound by how fast i can think about what i want to write. The only time i feel limited is when trying to transcribe while someone is talking but that's also a solved case since Shorthand and special typing equipment for that exists. I doubt you can type on any ascii based layout as fast as someone can on a shorthand typing system with equal training when it comes to natural language transcription.

Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

#26
post #11
post #10

I love the prominence of the "Swedish Road sign" aka "Command Key" aka "Apple Key". ⌘

Actually "Finnish road sign" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looped_square

Now that the doors of pedantry have been opened, the sources used in the article don't actually specify that it was a Finnish "road sign" first, only that it was first suggested as an official symbol by the Finnish national local history association in the 1950s (having been used in all of the nordics in an unofficial capacity a lot longer), and that it started being used in all of the nordics in this official capacity in the 60s. The sources that say where Susan Kare got the inspiration more specifically than "from the nordic/Scandinavian countries" all seem to state a Swedish road sign, though exactly where she/apple got the inspiration (if they even remember correctly) is probably unimportant.

Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

#27
post #7

Looks cool :) Can't use it cause my alphabet has three more letters than the English.

fwiw, I speak German and find the german layout to be insultingly unusable, especially for coding. So I use the american hardware layout (which lack three german letters) and type Umlaute äöü with alt+u+{a|o|u}. It doesn't feel like it adds significant overhead, I've built the muscle memory within minutes. Any acceptable operating system should allow for such mappings, on macos this is active by default.

I use EurKEY [0]. It has Ctrl+Alt+o for ö and also a ton of other characters.

[0]: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/

Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)

#30
fwiw, running the same evolutionary algorithm on Julia, Python and C++ files returned this layout

  ` 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
    c l r b z ; q u d j [ ] \
    s h n t , . a e o i ' \n
     f m v w ? y g x k p
  11 7 13 14 13 13 9 19 ,  45 | 55
  Symmetry: 61 Evenness: 81
  Overheads: F:37%, H:12%, S:9%
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