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The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

workmanlayout.org

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Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#21

Post by eggie »

fooblat wrote: post #9

As a full time developer who used to suffer terrible RSI pain, I solved the problem without changing keyboard layouts. After consulting with my doctor and an ergonomics expert, I realized my problems were cause by the setup of my workstation and the bad posture habits I had developed. 1. I would rest my palms as I typed. This turned out to be a major source of pain. Retraining myself to "float" my hands over the keyb…

Did you consider using an isomorphic layout like the typematrix? I find the anachronistic skew in keyboards to be a source of discomfort.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#22

Post by fooblat »

eggie wrote: post #21
fooblat wrote: post #9

As a full time developer who used to suffer terrible RSI pain, I solved the problem without changing keyboard layouts. After consulting with my doctor and an ergonomics expert, I realized my problems were cause by the setup of my workstation and the bad posture habits I had developed. 1. I would rest my palms as I typed. This turned out to be a major source of pain. Retraining myself to "float" my hands over the keyb…

Did you consider using an isomorphic layout like the typematrix? I find the anachronistic skew in keyboards to be a source of discomfort.

I have only recently learned about isomorphic keyboards and I am indeed curious to try one.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#24

Post by scns »

lorenzhs wrote: post #8

This looks interesting but the symbol still look very qwerty-ish. I type on Neo-2 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Neo ), which uses ISO keyboards and primarily targets German, even though the majority of my typing is in English. Its entire third layer is for symbols that are common in programming. Layer 3 is activated via either caps-lock or the key above Right Shift, and has \/{}* ?()-:@ as the home…

Can not recommend this layout highly enough. Every time i am forced to use qwertz shows me how bad a standard layout is. Qwerty was developed at the times of the first typewriters to prevent jamming by slowing typists down

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#25

Post by erfgh »

sscarduzio wrote: post #23

This is an excellent solution to a problem no programmer has. After 10 years of programming I can safely tell that, if you type the majority of your time until you make your wrists sick, you are writing shit code and you should spend more time thinking.

Everyone is built differently. Some people will get tendonitis with just a small amount of typing.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#26

Post by jstanley »

reacweb wrote: post #16

He uses the wrong test. Testing on "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" is meaningless for developpers: tests should be performed using real usages like "source code of linux kernel" or "mailing list of linux kernel" to have a better balance between code and text.

Even better, it should be performed using a recorded vim session, rather than a full file. The keystrokes you use while editing are not the same as those that end up in the finished file.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#27

Post by adrianm »

sscarduzio wrote: post #23

This is an excellent solution to a problem no programmer has. After 10 years of programming I can safely tell that, if you type the majority of your time until you make your wrists sick, you are writing shit code and you should spend more time thinking.

Do you not write emails, search the web, or do writing on a computer of any kind? I wouldn’t be so quick to judge here. You don’t know what they are really doing on their keyboard all day. Maybe typing is all we have due to a physical disability that limits mobility and communication in other ways. There are a lot of possibilities beyond “writing shit code”.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#28

Post by diimdeep »

Kudos for effort. But changing layout is not enough.

Current mainstream keyboards design is fundamentally flawed [1] and IMO obsolete because of [4].

Hopefully there is science [2] and much alternatives to choose from [3]

[1] http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_problems.html

[2] http://xahlee.info/kbd/ergonomic_keyboard_science.html

[3] https://github.com/diimdeep/awesome-split-keyboards

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#29

Post by leg100 »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #4
tezza wrote: post #3

A large portion of coding is moving the cursor left, right, up, down, page up, page down, home, end The arrow keys are not even shown on the layout. And the selection of prose corpus (es?) is again not related to programming [Tom Sawyer]. We need underscores, braces, semicolon, context menu. Perhaps a better metric would be the hoc compiler source from The Unix Programming Environment.

> A large portion of coding is moving the cursor left, right, up, down, page up, page down, home, end > The arrow keys are not even shown on the layout Nothing that learning Vim keybindings can't solve.

What about using a browser, terminal usage outside of vim, and insert-mode in vim? Do you use vimium in chrome and vim-mode in bash?

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#30

Post by jstanley »

scns wrote: post #24
lorenzhs wrote: post #8

This looks interesting but the symbol still look very qwerty-ish. I type on Neo-2 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Neo ), which uses ISO keyboards and primarily targets German, even though the majority of my typing is in English. Its entire third layer is for symbols that are common in programming. Layer 3 is activated via either caps-lock or the key above Right Shift, and has \/{}* ?()-:@ as the home…

Can not recommend this layout highly enough. Every time i am forced to use qwertz shows me how bad a standard layout is. Qwerty was developed at the times of the first typewriters to prevent jamming by slowing typists down

This is a common but enduring myth. It was designed to separate the levers for common digraphs, to prevent jams. It was not designed to slow the typist down, but to ensure typing at full speed did not cause jams.
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