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The keyboard layout project

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Re: The keyboard layout project

#31

Post by MTGandP »

stinky613 wrote: post #13
techiferous wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dvorak, with a larger support failed." If by failed you mean widespread adoption. But I have been using Dvorak since 1999 on a variety of platforms without a problem. It's a personal success for me. "the trouble it is for them to manage different keyboard layouts in their head. I wonder if that's the same for dvorak layout users." It's only on extremely rare cases that I've been forced to use QWERTY (such as at a pu…

That's great that it works for you, but 'widespread adoption'? Really? If you were to take a random sample of 100 computer users how many do you seriously think have adopted Dvorak?

IIRC, Dvorak has about 500,000 users worldwide.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#32

Post by zokier »

flixic wrote: post #9
guylhem wrote: post #8

Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed? The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at leas…

Hardware is not a problem. Here I am, typing these words with Colemak layout on qwerty keyboard. Software, on the other hand, is a slight annoyance. Colemak (and any other keyboard layout) can easily be available in pretty much any OS except iOS. Also, many games implement their own keyboard input handling, and disregards custom layouts.

Hardware becomes problem when the keyboard you use has the wrong number of keys in the wrong positions for the layout you would want to use.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#35

Post by MTGandP »

dsego wrote: post #2

How about this - The Workman Keyboard Layout http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-differe... But the layout is just one of the problems. The key staggering is also not very ergonomic. There are two cool keyboards featuring symmetric key positioning: - Truly ergonomic keyboard http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php - Type matrix http://typematrix.com

Author of The Keyboard Layout Project here. I'm familiar with Workman; it's a reasonably strong attempt, but I think it has a number of problems and fails to perform as well as Colemak or my own layouts.

If you compare Workman and MTGAP 3.14 (shown [here](http://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress.com/the-keyboard-layo...) using [my keyboard evaluator](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing), MTGAP 3.14 performs better on every single statistic except finger work. (You can see all of the different statistics explained on [my GitHub page](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing/blob/master/Fitness). I didn't post them all here because it takes up too much space, but if you want, you can pull the program and to the comparison yourself.)

Re: The keyboard layout project

#36

Post by MTGandP »

dsego wrote: post #23
mistercow wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you have any references to support non-staggered keys are superior? I ask because (100 - ε)% of claims about ergonomics are completely unsupported by scientific research.

Not really. But you can take a look at Maltron keyboards, which are non-staggered and also curved. From what I can find on the web it seems that they have done some research.

The [Kinesis](http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/) Advantage is a cheaper alternative to Maltron that follows the same design pattern. It's the keyboard I use, and it's definitely more comfortable than a typical staggered keyboard, or even a simpler ergonomic keyboard.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#37

Post by MTGandP »

moonboots wrote: post #7

I question whether these keyboard layouts are ideal for programmers. On Qwerty, Colemak, Dvorak, and Workman, the symbol keys are pushed to the periphery of the keyboard. To improve practical typing efficiency, I created and use http://typing.io , which allows you to type real code instead of prose.

You can use [my keyboard layout optimizer](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing) to create your own optimized keyboard. I provide a corpus of programming text you can use, and you can change the weightings to increase the significance of the programming text. (I don't remember if I wrote documentation explaining how to do this; if you want to do this but can't figure out how, remind me and I'll write up some documentation.)

Re: The keyboard layout project

#38

Post by Evbn »

MTGandP wrote: post #27
mistercow wrote: post #4

For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed. So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the p…

Hi, writer of The Keyboard Layout Project here. I'm well aware of the limitations of scoring a layout based on crude heuristics, and I'm trying to collect some good data. Right now I have some data from a few layouts that I've collected using [Amphetype]( http://code.google.com/p/amphetype/ ), which records speed and accuracy for characters, trigraphs, and words. I'm curious, what program did you use to collect typin…

I wonder what the ethics review board would think about training someone on a nonstandard keyboard layout, as that would introduce a handicap to their life outside the study.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#39

Post by MTGandP »

Evbn wrote: post #38
MTGandP wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, writer of The Keyboard Layout Project here. I'm well aware of the limitations of scoring a layout based on crude heuristics, and I'm trying to collect some good data. Right now I have some data from a few layouts that I've collected using [Amphetype]( http://code.google.com/p/amphetype/ ), which records speed and accuracy for characters, trigraphs, and words. I'm curious, what program did you use to collect typin…

I wonder what the ethics review board would think about training someone on a nonstandard keyboard layout, as that would introduce a handicap to their life outside the study.

You can use a new keyboard layout and still remember QWERTY. It's just like learning a second language (only it takes a lot less time).

Re: The keyboard layout project

#40

Post by mistercow »

MTGandP wrote: post #27
mistercow wrote: post #4

For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed. So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the p…

Hi, writer of The Keyboard Layout Project here. I'm well aware of the limitations of scoring a layout based on crude heuristics, and I'm trying to collect some good data. Right now I have some data from a few layouts that I've collected using [Amphetype]( http://code.google.com/p/amphetype/ ), which records speed and accuracy for characters, trigraphs, and words. I'm curious, what program did you use to collect typin…

I'll see if I can dig up my old app for collecting the data (it was an OS X app, but would be easy enough to port). It can actually be layout agnostic (although I may have just implemented it with Colemak in mind, since it was for my own use). For the user's sake, it asks you to type out symbols according to your own layout, but the way it stores the data is only interested in key positions.

One confounding factor in collecting data this way, though, is it's actually quite a lot more difficult to copy a random sequence of characters than it is to copy real words, and I don't think that's just because of the key positions. I think it just takes more brain power to process them when you can't leverage your brain's language hardware to divide it into chunks.

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