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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)

#41

Post by dylan604 »

chaorace wrote: post #31
dylan604 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back in the dark ages of having to work in an office with shared space in a cubicle farm, it wasn't unheard of where people would swap their keyboards with others because theirs was not working correctly rather than going through IT to get it looked at--possibly also knowing IT might just shrug their useless shoulders at it. I'm guessing a keyboard with blank keys would prevent that.

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

#42

Post by dylan604 »

akira2501 wrote: post #29
neilv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Entirely anecdotal point here, but I learned to type in 6th grade, at a time when manual typewriters where more prevalent than computer keyboards. I've never experienced RSI. My hands only get tired after about 10 hours of work and after a full night of sleep they're entirely fine. Probably the same reason I love keyboards with "cherry blue" type switches in them.

This was my thinking as well that the "formal" typing instruction really helps more than people appreciate. Having a teacher come by and scold you for having lazy typing posture definitely sets a good habit. At least it wasn't as bad as the meme of a nun and a her ruler, but it was the next best thing without physical contact.

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

#43

Post by gramie »

red_hare wrote: post #15

> ALT-yen-mark to get a proper backslash I believe this is an artifact of JIS_X0201, which is, to my knowledge, the first major Japanese 8-bit encoding and mostly 7-bit ASCII + Katakana (that character set you see in old Japanese video games) and some Japan-specific symbols filling the other half of the 8-bit space. In it, byte 0x23 was changed from "\" to "¥". The history is fascinating: > The 1964 ISO draft reserve…

Related to this, when I was in Japan in the '90s I had to get used to "¥" being the directory separator, so a path might be:

C:¥Program Files¥Microsoft¥Office¥word.exe

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

#44

Post by ryukafalz »

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…

One of my favorite keyboard layout tweaks is being able to tap left/right shift for open/close parens. How well it works depends on the keyboard but especially on split keyboards it can be very nice.

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

#45

Post by lxgr »

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…

Do you actually have to wait for the modal to show up? I was under the impression you could just press ctrl + shift and not wait for the modal and it would still switch layouts, but I could be misremembering.

Regarding muscle memory: That hasn’t been a problem for me as much as some shortcuts just not working.

Some applications seem to insist on controlling these by key codes, but display them as characters mapped to a US ANSI layout, giving me no way to actually configure the one I want for those keys that are physically different between ANSI and ISO.

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

#47

Post by lxgr »

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.

I used to do this, and my company used to let me pick the layout of my laptop – but at some point they stopped, and since covid there’s now hotdesking, so I begrudgingly readjusted to a physical ANSI layout, mapped to QWERTZ.

Makes it very hard for colleagues to “quickly” type something on my computer if they can’t be bothered explaining what they want me to type in pair programming :)

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

#48

Post by jacquesl »

I used one for 10-15 years, and the extra column of characters definitely were bad for RSI. My right ring finger’s tendon was impacted the most. The extra reach to arrows, the enter key, etc. were too much for me. I went back to a US layout and don’t have issues now.

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

#49

Post by mih »

seritools wrote: post #8
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…

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

A cross-platform alternative is to use the EurKey layout (https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/layout.html), allowing you to have the US keyboard layout by default, while using modifier keys for various diacritics common in European languages with Latin script.
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