21–30 of 78 posts
I then discovered VIA/QMK keyboards and now I have keycaps I can't even see on my vertically mounted split-key keyboard and more programmability than I know what to do with. But in 2012, a Japanese Keyboard was much cheaper than a Kinesis and to me the only option.
Maybe it's because I took an actual typing class way back in the dark days of actual clackity-clack type writers, but I don't get the dislike of shift keys. Are these people that learned to type from only playing games or other non-formalized learning to type? Kudos for you learning regardless of the method, I'm just looking at why I don't have the same aversion to the shift keys. I even use the "proper" shift key me…
I never learned to type "properly" and I also don't really care or think about modifier keys. I suspect it's one of those things - like coffee snobs searching for the perfect pourover technique, or steak snobs perfecting their reverse sear - wherein people take a hobby, passion, or profession of theirs and feel a need to hyperoptimize it.
Back when the Internet became aware of typing injuries (RSI), folk wisdom was that one of the causes was the multiple simultaneous key presses, because of how people often contorted their hands to do it.
I made various changes, and now, decades later, I can type all day and night, without discomfort (much to the chagrin of HN).
(Kudos to people who limit yourself to one modifier at a time, and who use the alternate hand for it. It's still more repetitive motion, but at least you're not going against the folk wisdom about contorting hands.)
10% of the remaining advantage of Scheme today is not needing to use the Shift key to type identifiers on US keyboards. Instead, you use minus rather than underscore, and there's no camel-case, and mostly no all-caps (except for syntax transformer pattern variables, IMHO). However, Scheme and other Lisps have the problem of parentheses being a shifted character on most US keyboards. For Scheme, my Emacs tweaks includ…
The file is at https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/DonKeys...., linked from https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a decade long Emacs user, I can not follow: what's the problem with modifier keys?! Just kidding, I know that some people have a hard time typing them, especially when your day job consists of doing exactly that for eight hours.
> what's the problem with modifier keys?! Lets say your keyboard requires modifier keys for a specific symbol, but your program treats that input differently depending on whether modifier keys are held or not. Or another bad one, lets say your keyboard requires multiple strokes for a specific symbol, for example backticks, and your language uses backticks as quotes... So many language and programs designed with stran…
10% of the remaining advantage of Scheme today is not needing to use the Shift key to type identifiers on US keyboards. Instead, you use minus rather than underscore, and there's no camel-case, and mostly no all-caps (except for syntax transformer pattern variables, IMHO). However, Scheme and other Lisps have the problem of parentheses being a shifted character on most US keyboards. For Scheme, my Emacs tweaks includ…
You can remap keys on any keyboard layout, no need to get a Japanese keyboard. Many years ago, I was working in a German lab and their keyboard layout is really impractical for programming in C-like languages because all commonly used symbols are really awkward to type. I wasn't well-versed in XFree86 then (or today for that matter) but I remember I could solve the problem by simply changing they map that Emacs uses…
This is the main reason why I just use the US ANSI layout in germany, together with KbdKaz on Windows for umlauts and a lot of other extra characters and accennts: https://www.omega-com.pl/kbdkaz.htm
Fun fact: amayon.de redirects to amazon.de
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never learned to type "properly" and I also don't really care or think about modifier keys. I suspect it's one of those things - like coffee snobs searching for the perfect pourover technique, or steak snobs perfecting their reverse sear - wherein people take a hobby, passion, or profession of theirs and feel a need to hyperoptimize it.
One of the reasons... Back when the Internet became aware of typing injuries (RSI), folk wisdom was that one of the causes was the multiple simultaneous key presses, because of how people often contorted their hands to do it. I made various changes, and now, decades later, I can type all day and night, without discomfort (much to the chagrin of HN). (Kudos to people who limit yourself to one modifier at a time, and w…
Probably the same reason I love keyboards with "cherry blue" type switches in them.
I will admit, JIS layout makes writing Clojure a bit easier, though it also makes quoting tedious. Escaping is even more tedious. Push M-¥ is one option. Another option is to configure Mac OS to output backslash, but then you can't input ¥.
When coding with an ASCII keyboard, I frequently make typos due to muscle memory. If you work in the US, that is another major disadvantage. Your work computers will have ASCII keyboards, not JIS keyboards.