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The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

workmanlayout.org

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Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#41

Post by leg100 »

QasimK wrote: post #36
leg100 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I suspect the answers would be: use non-arrow keybindings for browsers (e.g. vim-like plug-ins, or alternative keyboard shortcuts), remap your terminals keys (maybe, use a different terminal entirely?), use insert mode for only inserting text. I use a “vimium” plug-in for Firefox and I quite like being able to go up/down with j/k. Though I still use the arrow keys for my terminal.

Yup I've just installed vimium on chrome, and it seems to do the job.

I've tried out vim-mode bash in the past, but much prefer the default emacs-mode on the command line, despite being a vim user.

Either way I'm suspecting a ton of exceptions which necessitate resorting often to the cursor keys, however (like another commenter has mentioned w.r.t various GUI apps).

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#42

Post by diimdeep »

bitofhope wrote: post #37
diimdeep wrote: post #28

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…

The first link references the myth of QWERTY being meant for slowing typists down. It merely spreads most common letters out so them being pressed together doesn't jam the typewriter.

Yeah agree, except that error, didn't find better article to link to.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#43

Post by rlkf »

eggie wrote: post #20

The author doesn't even learn dvorak before deciding that it doesn't work for them. They mention don't like how it behaves on the consonant-heavy, qwerty-optimized commands used in unix. (I have to say this is a fair evaluation, but in practice the layout somehow doesn't encourage RSI despite the apparent awkwardness of typing unix commands on it.) In result they don't seem to understand that the dvorak layout is opt…

> dvorak layout is optimized for alternation between hands and inward rolling motion

True; Dvorak seems to always score worse on tests that don't weight distance by ease.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#44

Post by leg100 »

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.

If you have to use these keys, then Kinesis advantage keyboard places them in more convenient positions: the left and right keys are on one side; the up and down on the other side; the home and end keys beneath the thumbs.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#45

Post by StreakyCobra »

Anything other than [AQ]WERT[YZ] layout-based keyboard is already a big improvement for your fingers. The differences between Workman / Colemak / Dvorak and so on is mostly a matter of taste. One thing to note is that widely used layouts have more chances to be supported by software and by keyboard manufacturers (e.g. http://www.typematrix.com/). So it may be wiser to choose mainstream layouts that creating your own or using niche ones.

There is probably not a definitive answer for which one is better ("better" would have to be defined for this), so go ahead, read a bit about them and do your choice. Be aware though that once you have choose one, you will be stuck with it for a looong time, because switching layout is hard. You have to remap all your brain an muscle memory before being able to reach your previous efficiency. Spoiler alert: it takes months to years for this.

PS: For french speaking people, you may want to have a look at https://bepo.fr

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#46

Post by cammil »

floatboth wrote: post #33

> Try typing “The” with the T capitalized on Colemak and hopefully you’ll see what I mean. Your right hand will move somewhat like this: you swing to the right to get the SHIFT key with your pinky, then you swing back to the left to get the letter ‘H’, and then you move to the right again to get the letter ‘E’. Why would you use the right shift here?? I shift with the left pinky in this situation and it feels fine. C…

I think there is a theory that one "should" use the _other_ hand for any modifiers. Presumably and primarily so that the letter key is always pressed using the same finger and position of the hand.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#48

Post by petepete »

I'm glad that alternative keyboard layouts seem to be gaining traction but I just can't go cold turkey and move away from QWERTY.

The biggest annoyances for me with regular keyboards are that caps lock is a wasted key in a prime position and the F keys are too far out of the way.

These were solved by the HHKB and that's what I'll be using for the foreseeable future.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#49

Post by sscarduzio »

adrianm wrote: post #27
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”.

yeah, yeah, I guess there's multiple edge cases.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#50

Post by toyg »

roenxi wrote: post #14

It is interesting, given that the corpuses are available, that keyboard design isn't framed as some sort of linear or nonlinear optimising problem. Choose a set of tasks -> plug into an optimiser -> get a keyboard mapping tuned to the task you are doing. There'd be people who find that useful. The maths isn't at all hard, the data is there. EDIT Maybe it would be a fun project to take something like top 100 C librari…

The problem is generalizing the corpus enough to make it viable for more tasks than "writing C libraries", so that it can achieve mainstream support. The parameters to consider are also contentious - are we optimising for travel, finger stretching, speed, etc ...? It's not just about data.
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