I'm not sure I would like the caps lock doing double duty as both control and escape, since it seems like it would be easy to accidentally use it wrong. I always remap the caps lock to control, but long ago I trained myself to use control-] in place of escape so I never have to reach for that dreaded key when using vi, and I can also use emacs happily.
A Modern Space Cadet
31–40 of 56 posts
Re: A Modern Space Cadet
#32Have anyone implemented any of this on Windows, perhaps with Autohotkey? Is it possible?
Re: A Modern Space Cadet
#33I love the shift click to get brackets trick, any idea on how to get it on vim?
So X will translate keycodes from the keyboard press/release events that contain keysyms + modifiers + more (look up X keypress event) that get sent to your terminal emulator. Your terminal emulator will translate those into ascii chars or sequences in order to send them to your editor. (Note that, without translating some of these X keyboard events into escape sequences, you can't express the full range of possible keys and chords in ASCII.)
You can define custom translations keysym for some terminal emulators. I've done this in urxvt in order to free up C-j and C-S-[letter] combinations for my own use.
urxvt will allow you to translate the Shift_L keycode into "(" or "()" or "i_love_hacker_news_press event is received, so you'll output "(" even when you press shift as part of a chord.
You can write perl scripts in urxvt that can capture X keyboard events, and maybe your script could only output "(" if it detects that no intermediate X event was detected between the press and the release of "(".
I'm not totally sure that you get THAT much info from urxvt, but it's the best approach that I know of. As an alternative, maybe you could write a program to intercept X events before they reach the terminal (and/or any other program).
That's about as far as I care to go right now.
Let me know if you get something working, I'd be interested in using it too.
Re: A Modern Space Cadet
#34Oddly enough the ctrl key in the home row is a Unix thing (I think it's a Sun invention, but I don't recall). On the original space cadet keyboard (and all the Symbolics keyboards), Rub Out is located where modern day Caps Lock is found (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard ). Ctrl is still located on the bottom row. Has anyone tried remapping a delete key to where the Caps Lock key is found? Is the…
> Has anyone tried remapping a delete key to where the Caps Lock key is found? The Colemak keyboard layout does that.
It doesn't work with the Colemak input method that comes with OS X though. I don't think there's any way to change caps lock to delete in a keylayout file, but you can always use PCKeyboardHack.
Re: A Modern Space Cadet
#35I'm hoping the split spacebar that Microsoft introduced[1] starts catching on with mechanical keyboard makers. The left side of the spacebar currently wastes valuable real estate. Putting another backspace key would move the most typed key into easy reach instead of forcing the right pinky to leap on every error. On the topic of keyboard ergonomics, I also believe that all keyboards should be tenkeyless. It's another…
Definitely. I'd just be happy if you could get a mechanical keyboard that uses the layout that MS uses for its ergonomic keyboards, with the split keys and the height gently swelling in the center where the split is. (Look at the Natural Keyboard 4000 to see what I'm talking about: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/natural-ergonomic-... ) Once you get used to typing on a keyboard that uses this layout, going…
The action on the Natural 4000 is so stiff that I know several people who experienced severe bouts of RSI within hours to days of getting one.
Check out Kinesis: great layout, and great switches. One or the other just isn't enough for many.
Re: A Modern Space Cadet
#36Great post. Consider the following changes to the Greek mapping to be consistent with Greek keyboards and the "greek" input mode in Emacs:
q Q: ; :
w W: ς Σ
y Y: υ Υ
u U: θ Θ
j J: ξ Ξ
x X: χ Χ
c C: ψ Ψ
v V: ω ΩRe: A Modern Space Cadet
#37I have the happy hacking keyboard professional 2. It's fantastic. The reason the [fn] key is positioned off, and it's hard to get at the arrow keys, is because the HHKB was specifically designed to make it hard to use the arrow keys, as they are a curse. (stay on Home Row). There are alternatives, hjkl for vim and or CONTROL-... for emacs dudes and dudettes.
Re: A Modern Space Cadet
#38I'm still rocking my 1990 IBM Model-M. These things are truly indestructible.
I wore one out a year ago. It was going through an AT to PS/2 adapter then a PS/2 to USB adapter. The "S" key started only working on about 9/10 keystrokes :(
It may not be worth the effort, but you can still get replacement parts for them. Or just go with a new Unicomp.
Re: A Modern Space Cadet
#39I'm not sure I would like the caps lock doing double duty as both control and escape, since it seems like it would be easy to accidentally use it wrong. I always remap the caps lock to control, but long ago I trained myself to use control-] in place of escape so I never have to reach for that dreaded key when using vi, and I can also use emacs happily.
Probably everybody reading Steve's post had a "eureka" moment on different sections. For me, it was the dual-duty caps lock key idea. I've always used "ii" remapped to ESC in vim insert mode--that changes today.
Re: A Modern Space Cadet
#40Does anyone know how to setup a keyboard to pass absolutely all keys to a VM?
I like OSX for power management and driver compatability, but I sorely miss having a tiling window manager. I would like total pass through of keystrokes to a VM. Dropping out of the VM could be accomplished by running a program on the host machine via ssh from the VM.