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Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

daveperrett.com

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Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#31

Post by chaorace »

dylan604 wrote: post #13
deathanatos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially on keyboards with blank keycaps. :)

Now that's a blast from the past in typing class. I remember hearing people complaining about this or rather using it as a horror story about the class. Of course by the point in the class you use these, you've passed the point of being expected to know where the keys are and it is pretty much an advanced part of the class. Not sure if that's your reference or not???

A not insignificant number of keyboard enthusiasts prefer to use blank keycaps. It's often merely an aesthetic choice, but those who like to tinker with custom layouts also favor them because that lets them skip shuffling keycaps around following a layout change.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#32

Post by neilv »

chuckadams wrote: post #27
neilv wrote: post #19

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…

R6RS scheme lets you use square brackets equivalently to parentheses.

If you want uncomfortable pointy corners, sure.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#33

Post by karmakaze »

Food for thought. When I was making my own custom keyboard layout I resisted the additional rabbit hole of shuffling punctuation. The only change I did make was to put ',' above right-hand pinky (shifted is ':' and home-row pinky being a letter). I decided I'm not going to use semi-colon terminated programming languages anymore so it's fine to be down with the '<' key.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#34

Post by glandium »

mgaunard wrote: post #20

That's an Apple Japanese keyboard. Apple messes with the standard keyboard of all layouts.

I guess you're being downvoted because of how you said it, but you're not wrong. I have a Japanese keyboard too, albeit not a Mac one, and the underscore needs shift (without shift, it's backslash, which means that yes, I don't need to use M-¥). Caps lock is also under tab, and Control on the bottom left.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#35

Post by karmakaze »

kleiba wrote: post #4

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…

Seeing as it wasn't mentioned, there's a Ukelele[0] app for making keyboard layouts for macOS. After installing a layout, switching is as easy as tapping 'fn' by itself or using the keyboard menu icon. For Windows there's MS Keyboard Layout Creator[1].

[0] https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=102...

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#36

Post by wormius »

The keys I hate the most are $ % ^ & { }

I think underscores are pretty painless, but maybe it's just that my hands being like Trumps tiny hands make it less painful? I never liked the idea of a short space bar, but thinking about it now with the comment of having a couple useful buttons does sound kinda nice.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#37

Post by wormius »

Jensson wrote: post #11
kleiba wrote: post #9

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…

Laughs in Perl

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#38

Post by fragmede »

koito17 wrote: post #30

I always buy Macbooks with JIS layout, not because underscores are convenient to type. It's convenient to push the かな button to start writing in Japanese then 英数 when finished. On an ASCII keyboard, Mac OS requires either C- or pushing the Fn key, both of which waste an entire second to display a modal, then another second to actually switch keyboard layout. I will admit, JIS layout makes writing Clojure a bit easier…

Bring your own keyboard to work and have JIS keyboards shipped in from overseas. Imo it's worth it to not ruin/fight muscle memory.

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#39

Post by nomel »

kleiba wrote: post #4

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…

Should this also be possible with a hardware dongle, for the cases where you can’t control the software?

Re: Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)

#40

Post by dhosek »

fragmede wrote: post #38
koito17 wrote: post #30

I always buy Macbooks with JIS layout, not because underscores are convenient to type. It's convenient to push the かな button to start writing in Japanese then 英数 when finished. On an ASCII keyboard, Mac OS requires either C- or pushing the Fn key, both of which waste an entire second to display a modal, then another second to actually switch keyboard layout. I will admit, JIS layout makes writing Clojure a bit easier…

Bring your own keyboard to work and have JIS keyboards shipped in from overseas. Imo it's worth it to not ruin/fight muscle memory.

Added bonus, you don’t have to deal with your co-workers stealing your keyboard.
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