Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

workmanlayout.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 165 posts

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#51

Post by chx »

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…

> much alternatives to choose from [3]

You can turn a few of those alternatives to vertical. I've been using a QWERTY vertical keyboard since 2009 and which I had some wrist pains before, not since.

Current setup https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79810.0

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#52

Post by vemv »

I left Colemak for Qwerty some 5 years ago. Keyboard layout matters much less than your typing technique.

Same thing for ergonomic keyboards - they can be a dangerous sign that you're focusing on the wrong thing, on micro-optimizations rather than on the root cause.

I have no guide to share unfortunately but I'd recommend observing one's movements, and try to figure out what's the most natural way of doing a given thing.

Also, regardless of what you do, typing many hours will tire you / be painful. Act accordingly.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#53

Post by edpichler »

My thoughts:

- if the author of the article is moving his fingers laterally, probably he is doing something wrong (must use other fingers instead of moving, this is typewriting). Independent of the layout, this cannot happen.

- I believe that there is no silver bullet for keyboard layout if you write code and text, more than one language, statistics of your typing are unique for the languages you currently use.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#54

Post by edpichler »

I moved to Dvorak year ago. Very very happy with this.

The pain of my hands, especially on the weakest fingers, just ended. The sad is that there are no available keyboards to buy in my country, so I always need to manually change and 'fix' my new laptops, risking to break it, and I always do it very worried and careful.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#55

Post by lorenzhs »

StreakyCobra wrote: post #45

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…

Agreed. I use neo2, which is the German equivalent of bépo. It's shipped with pretty much every Linux distro, which means that all I need to do is "setxkbmap de neo".

It definitely takes several months to achieve a decent speed on a new layout, but I wouldn't say years. I did a full switch after deciding I wanted to learn neo. That means that from that day on, I didn't use qwertz at all, and forced myself to type everything in neo. Also, don't use stickers. They teach you to look at the keyboard. Put a printout of the layout next to your keyboard and look at that. Otherwise you'll just form bad habits. It took me around a month to get to a point where my neo typing speed was reasonable, and maybe another month until I had managed to get to the point where it wasn't annoying any more. Of course I was in university back then, and not paid to develop software.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#56

Post by lorenzhs »

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.

My keyboard layout has navigation as a convenient layer -- https://neo-layout.org/grafik/flat/tastatur_e4.png -- but I don't actually use it. My keyboard is a ThinkPad USB keyboard, and I use the trackpoint instead of a mouse. It's right there on the home row, I don't have to move my hands to use it. Symbols are also very convenient: https://neo-layout.org/grafik/flat/tastatur_e3.png. This setup works really well for me.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#57

Post by 0XAFFE »

lorenzhs wrote: post #55
StreakyCobra wrote: post #45

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…

Agreed. I use neo2, which is the German equivalent of bépo. It's shipped with pretty much every Linux distro, which means that all I need to do is "setxkbmap de neo". It definitely takes several months to achieve a decent speed on a new layout, but I wouldn't say years. I did a full switch after deciding I wanted to learn neo. That means that from that day on, I didn't use qwertz at all , and forced myself to type ev…

Best thing is to print this https://neo-layout.org/grafik/aufsteller/neo20-aufsteller.pd... and put it behind your keyboard or somewhere where you can look with ease.

I think speed it no so much important when coding, but don't have to think about how and what you have to type.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#58

Post by edpichler »

edpichler wrote: post #54

I moved to Dvorak year ago. Very very happy with this. The pain of my hands, especially on the weakest fingers, just ended. The sad is that there are no available keyboards to buy in my country, so I always need to manually change and 'fix' my new laptops, risking to break it, and I always do it very worried and careful.

I use Windows and Mac OS, so years ago I create a layout and software to use your Apple Keyboard with Dvorak under Windows.

https://github.com/edpichler/Apple-Dvorak-on-Windows

I wish some movement of better layouts start, so people would engage, and the market would start to produce laptops coming ready for our use.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#59

Post by xupybd »

vemv wrote: post #52

I left Colemak for Qwerty some 5 years ago. Keyboard layout matters much less than your typing technique. Same thing for ergonomic keyboards - they can be a dangerous sign that you're focusing on the wrong thing, on micro-optimizations rather than on the root cause. I have no guide to share unfortunately but I'd recommend observing one's movements, and try to figure out what's the most natural way of doing a given th…

I went for a kenesis advantage and it solved all my problems. I think a big part was it forced me to type better. It’s too hard to use the wrong fingers.

Re: The Workman Keyboard Layout Philosophy (2010)

#60

Post by StreakyCobra »

lorenzhs wrote: post #55
StreakyCobra wrote: post #45

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…

Agreed. I use neo2, which is the German equivalent of bépo. It's shipped with pretty much every Linux distro, which means that all I need to do is "setxkbmap de neo". It definitely takes several months to achieve a decent speed on a new layout, but I wouldn't say years. I did a full switch after deciding I wanted to learn neo. That means that from that day on, I didn't use qwertz at all , and forced myself to type ev…

Years is a little bit too much yes. I also did a full switch after 1 month of "klavaro" [1] training, but I think it took me nearly one year to be "fully" adapted. By "fully" I mean not thinking anymore about QWERTZ: not for french, nor for english, nor for coding and for beating my previous QWERTZ capabilities.

[1] http://klavaro.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

Post reply on HN