I tried to switch to workman a while ago. I only did it on my kinesis advantage (my main work board). I left my gaming keyboard, normal flat 65. I was able to switch back and forth but I credit that to a kind of muscle memory because of the advantages physical layout.
I also went back, partly 'getting back up to speed' frustration and partially because I'm really not sure what I was going to get out of it. After almost 40 years with qwerty keyboards ... it doesn't seem like i'm going to get that much benefit if there is even a measurable benefit.
I know i've seen them but it might be easierjust to go with a layout like one of these.. I'm not suggesting this particular company, i have no experience.. but just easy to find photos:
I’m pretty happy with just plain HHKB, just wish I could have that layout on a laptop. Maybe one of these days some company will produce aftermarket HHKB layout keyboard components for Framework laptops…
I'm super happy with it. So much so that I have two. However, occasionally I do want to "play pacman with one hand and eat pizza with other". Impossible to do with HHKB.
The ANSI HHKB does not have the arrows, but if you're willing to use the JIS HHKB, it actually comes with dedicated arrow keys, and even a split spacebar with extra thumb keys that you can reprogram with software to act however you want.
If you haven't experienced RSI to the point where you understand that reaching for distant keys is literally painful, then I can see how you might come to the conclusion that it's just for e-peen points.
Yes about 20 years ago, I switched to a kinesis advantage (then called the essential) it solved all my problems and I still have a relatively normal amount of keys.
Lots of the fancy keyboards coming out at the moment are settling around the layout the advantage has had for decades (although usually without the nice curve the advantage has).
yeah no the whole ergo-dox moonlander blahblah family is just 'advantage but way easier to build cause it's flat'... and they all suck because they are flat.
I tried out a friends glove80... it's just kinesis but still worse, there are a few things that kinesis does. It's better than the ergo-dox because keywells.. it's better than the glove 80 because of the keycap profiling. I do think the profiling on the 360 is a little worse than the older advantage 1/2 but it's pretty good. .. but like the glove 80 all the keycaps are the same height from the switch and it's not great.
(to give props advantage basically stole from maltron but the build quality on those is so so shitty.. vacuform cases sometimes)
It is fun, you learn something in process, nothing wrong with that. E.g. knowledge I have acquired while playing with keyboards was beneficial while fixing some home appliances and toys. I don’t have any health problems like RSI and find it more comfortable. And BTW there is end game - you can create one key Morse keyboard that is actually usable https://blog.ffff.lt/posts/morsilka/
I've built half a dozen keyboards I've build handwired, bought pcbs off the shelf and designed my own pcb for a custom 'keyboard' for a space flight simulator so that i could more easily use it under vr. It's fun and all, but chasing the how few keys do i need genie is a waste of time.
> The whole 'least keys possible i'm 31337 hax0r' optimization fuckery I just find hilarious.
On most typical keyboards, your thumbs only get to press one huge spacebar. (Which means for keys like shift, enter, backspace, the hands need to move, or the pinkies need to stretch).
Whereas, most of these "31337 hax0r" keyboards allow each thumb to use two or three keys each. With that, the thumbs can then use backspace/enter/etc. without the fingers having to stretch, or hands having to move.
i use one of those keyboards but one with a sane number of buttons (kinesis advantage) I have access to 12 thumb keys. Modifiers, space, backspace, delete, enter being the primary ones I use, but also pagup, pagedown, home, end.
Putting very commonly used charters on a modifier and probably two modifiers (layer+shift is common to get to a third layer) for keyboards with ~40 or under keys is connotative overhead for quite a while no matter how you cut it.
> Putting very commonly used characters on a modifier and probably two modifiers (layer+shift is common to get to a third layer) for keyboards with ~40 or under keys is connotative overhead for quite a while no matter how you cut it.
Sure, but it's a different cost, rather than an additional cost.
Any key that's not within reach of your hands at rest on home row, your hands will either need to move, or your fingers will need to stretch to reach them.
The sub-40-key keyboards trade-off the cost of a more sophisticated keymap, for the benefit of bringing the full functionality of the keyboard within reach of the hands.
well good luck with your optimal 10 key keyboard so that you never have to move your fingers. Or one of those crazy datahand style boards where there are four buttons surrounding your fingertip.
I kept qwerty but moved each half outward so g and h are now where f and j used to be. From there I moved all of the outer keys to the two new columns in the center, plus a few other tweaks. Got enter on the corner so it's a palm-press.
If I use a normal keyboard my pinkys start to hurt again, goes away when I switch back to my custom one.
Jonas' keyboard layout is so awesome and incredibly inspirational for my own journey -- probably the single most read documents that I've spent time with this year.
This sounds like 'hah, I have that one trick', but as someone who benefited a lot from being conscious about the ones posture... please, take a look at yourself before.
When I learned to use computers I naturally gravitated towards holding my arms at about 45 degrees, with fingers on left-shift, A, W, D and K, O, ;, '.
After some time we had some touch typing in classes at school and it was so painful trying to have my hands square on. So I just ignored that whole thing and continued my style.
I find that most of the time people pretend there is a proper way to do things its actually them talking about their lack of skill or insecurity. They seem to have it right because they have been doing the thing for much longer than you, so it is almost always an unfair comparison. If you look at it through the prism of ability development over time, it completely changes the dynamics and I believe those people are very often wrong because they only speak from their experience that is driven by their mediocrity or lack of skill.
In particular I learned to cook both professionally and for my own benefit and I discovered around professional kitchen that cooks are taught many stupid things that are mostly about covering somebody's ass for security or enforcing an inefficient way of working to keep people busy. You would be amazed how little relevance the pro cook learning has to the actual completion of the task efficiently; in fact they would often gain so much efficiency if they learned to let go of their learned behaviors.
Another pet peeve of mine is the requirement of "warming up" before sports like running or the like. In my youth, every single sports teacher of mine pissed me off by requiring this nonsense even though I really felt it was at best a waste of time and even counterproductive. And now we actually have studies that prove this as a fact, which would have been clear to someone who is not completely incompetent. Also, I have the performance numbers to back this up nowadays, so I am not taking any more of this nonsense.
In general, I feel it is sometimes hard to explain nicely to people that their limitations do not necessarily apply to everyone; it gets pretty hard to patiently listen to peoples that are clearly mediocre trying to teach you how to do stuff even though they are not very successful at the task they are teaching.
I had RSI and experimented with Dvorak, vertical keyboards, even vertical mice (terrible idea).
None of them helped. Surprisingly the thing that helped was getting a really good chair (I recommend a second hand HM Mira; don't get anything that sells itself as "ergonomic"), and a really deep desk so you can properly rest your forearms on the desk.
With that my RSI went away completely, even with a totally plain qwerty keyboard.
Dvorak was definitely nicer than QWERTY but when you add up...
1. You know qwerty. You'll probably never be as fast with Dvorak.
2. Ever want to type on any other keyboard in the world again? Yeah good luck. You will underestimate how often you type on coworkers' keyboards.
3. Ever use keyboard shortcuts? Well now they're awful.
I learned Dvorak 30 years ago due to RSI, and it's a pain for reasons 2 and 3. Maybe 10 years ago I just dropped it and went back to Qwerty. Got RSI, switched back to Dvorak, fixed it.
But speed is just a matter of experience. I don't know if I'm faster on Dvorak, but a speed that is really hammering keys in Qwerty feels comparatively effortless in Dvorak.
Even without RSI, overwhelmingly the anecdotes about Dvorak are that it feels more comfortable.
In terms of speed: I learned Dvorak, then went back to QWERTY. I returned to Dvorak a few years ago, and can now be faster with Dvorak than I was with QWERTY.
I got a HM Sayl. It is comfortable but it makes a racket of squeaks, creaks, and wailing noises every time I move. So much so that I try not to move at all during meetings these days. My previous $80 Staples chair didn't have this problem.
I've used quite a few Sayl chairs at my uni, I've never noticed them making any squeaks. Though my (2nd hand) Ikea marcus is pretty noisy. I think if you open up the chair and re-oil it it should be good.
I tried vertical mouse, and the biggest issue with it is that you need to rotate your wrist each time you reach for the mouse. Just using a keyboard without numpad solved the issue. Back in the days when I used a keyboard with numpad, I positioned my mouse below the keyboard (near the Space key) and it was a big improvement in terms of hand travel distance.
About keyboard shortcuts, with vim and ctrl-c/v I decided to use the characters of the layout, otherwise I thought it would be to confusing. But X, C and V are so comfortably next to each other that I sometimes make an exception.
> Ever want to type on any other keyboard in the world again?
I'd say this points more to "it's necessary to retain QWERTY".
Slightly bigger problem is if others want to type on your keyboard; you need to be able to switch it to QWERTY easily.
> Ever use keyboard shortcuts?
Yeah, this one does count against Dvorak.
Similarly, with mouse & keyboard stuff like Blender or CAD, you'll need to actually recall the letters are; which is different than when you've got two hands on the keyboard.
The main other things I'd say which count against Dvorak is that it will take some time to learn; and probably your motor-memory will be awful while learning it (so typing on any keyboard will be slow and error prone).
Still, I'm glad with the increase in comfort I got from learning Dvorak. (And these days I'm faster with Dvorak than I was with my undisciplined QWERTY).
> Ever want to type on any other keyboard in the world again? Yeah good luck. You will underestimate how often you type on coworkers' keyboards.
I can type still type on a regular keyboard with qwerty perfectly well.
> Ever use keyboard shortcuts? Well now they're awful.
Nah, you just have to keep that in consideration when designing the layout. Colemak keeps the most important ones in the same place, and the layout in OP has a dedicated shortcut layer for the ones not in a comfortable spot.
Does anyone do this and type in multiple languages regularly?
I could see myself getting into it if I only had to bother with a single layout, but since I deal with three different layouts on a daily basis, no way.
I use Dvorak and regularly type in both English and Chinese (Pinyin).
On Linux and Mac it's no issue to input both using Dvorak.
On Android, however, none of the Chinese input methods support Dvorak so I had to decompile and modify Google Pinyin's APK and rearrange the XML layout files to Dvorak.
I recently switched to Dvorak for iOS, which I was delighted to find as an option.
While I can still function on a full-size QWERTY keyboard on account of using them regularly, I almost never pick up someone else's phone, so my thumbs have forgotten it entirely.
It is annoying that Windows keeps Qwerty for it while Mac uses Dvorak. If it was just consistent (I constantly switch machines) it would be easy to handle and entirely subconscious by now...
But I start typing the wrong layout every time and lose a few seconds mentally reorienting myself.
I don't use Windows so I don't have an definitive answer for you but it seems possible to have Dvorak+Pinyin. This is 6 years old so I don't know if the latest versions of Windows work the same way
Yes, I type in Dutch, English and sometimes German. You have to check if the distance advantage also goes for the three languages, for me they all are more efficient and more comfortable in Dvorak with the I and U reversed.
It's not that much more comfortable, but definitely noticeable.
When you have had RSI anything that makes typing more comfortable helps.
Of course if you want the most efficient (you first have to decide on the factors, and the most efficient combination) layout for each language of the most efficient for the average of each language you can have a nice hobby for a year. I was afraid I'd end up with an esoteric layout and then after a few years find out that there was a better layout and I would learn that one all over again. Instead I decided to stick with DVORAK with an improvement tweak so it would be also more or less be usable on Android en iOS.
Yes. I'm also using my own layout on ErgoDox EZ, my languages are Czech (příšerně žlouťoučký kůň úpěl ďábelské ódy) and English. I'm also a (neo)vim user.
I found it hard to switch layouts, I'm using only one with layers. On first layer there are english letters, second layer there are accents (a → á) and some symbols where accent is missing (m → +). On third layer there are arrows on home row and functional keys. Shift without other key is `(`, on second layer `{`. There are some additional keys at the bottom and middle, they cover the rest of symbols. Outliers are mapped to start editor, browser, ctrl+c, ctrl+z, volume, mute, …
I really like having a single layout. I don't like that I'm no longer able to type on QWERTY without looking at keys. On my desktop, I'm 10 % faster, on any other computer I'm 90 % slower. Would I do it again? Probably yes.
I'm a native English speaker (with a lot of study of Frènch) and I am deeply grateful that English, while we have many dire critics, does not have diacritic accents. But it makes me curious. Could Czech (and the Scandi languages) do away with their diacritics and just stop using them? DONT INTERRUPT LET ME FINISH the question. I understand that you're used to it, and it's "nice", but is all that decoration absolutely necessary? SHUSH I'm not done. Let's look at Hebrew and Arabic: they don't indicate any vowels. Sounds crazy, sounds intolerable, but they get along just fine.
Because English and simple ASCII made such a nice team, just wondering, not trying to say anything diabolically odious or even ďábelské ódy
(I was making a macaronic joke, didn't look up the translation of that till after, but it was perfect! "devilish odes")
The difference between `s` and `š` is similar to `s` and `sh`. Can you omit `h` in Englis? Well, tecnically yes, but you canged the language. Same on you!
yes, I agree, that's the point I'm making: it's doable like abjads and their vowels. And by coincidence, only does Hebrew not have vowels, it also does not distinguish between s and sh, they are both that W-looking character! That's the spirit in which I was asking the question, they don't distinguish, but they still have no trouble reading and writing.
Unlike English, it's possible to read Czech without knowing the words (no tricks like "tomb"). If you omit accents, one would either have to know correct pronunciation or he will read it differently.
What you could do is to replace an accent with an ASCII character. Compare the name of town Český Těšín with its Polish equivalent Czeski Cieszyn (Č → Cz, ě → ie, š → sz). Actually, this is how we got here, 600 years ago Jan Hus (John the Goose) added diacritics to shorten a few diagrams in written language.
- Diacritics, for example in German, make writing and reading easier than English and you cannot have ghoti[1]
- Diacritics, is an easy way to avoid di-grams and tri-grams: English has "sh", Czech has "š" (it's not a decoration, it has a true meaning)
- ASCII seems to make a nice team with English because it's an American creation. Should English had some accents that ASCII would have included them, like dollar sign (this is an "S" with a stroke…)[2]
- Languages that could go with out vowels are those where words forms have no ambiguity. In English, "bt" for example is ambiguous because there's "bit", "bat", "but", "boat", etc.
So you are just having a ethnocentric point of view, that's human.
Why would anyone switch layouts, unless they're more than bilingual in non-English and layouts somehow comes with mutually offending differences? ASCII is subset to everything. Your national keyboard should be able to handle it.
AZERTY (french) keyboards made some unimportant choices which just turned out horribly over time. I can't remember exactly but in the age of MSWindows and the internet, characters like \\ and @ (I think) were just buried away so deeply. I have a number of French friends who can't deal, they just use QWERTY keyboards.
It has one clever design choice that nobody followed though: the fact that numbers are not wasting a full row of your keyboard without modifiers. Like, if I want to type a number I can start by pressing shift then typing the number, while all the braces I want to use are separated, and on a lot of layouts this implies using Shift which is annoying. (Or use the numpad, one more reason to not give them that much importance on the keyboard)
I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although it’s based on QWERTY, it shouldn’t be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since they’re autogenerated from the Windows version.
The only customiseable keyboard i want is one made of glass - a screen like macbook’s touchbar - where i can move keys around, add custom keys, or simply “enable” and show only those relevant to what i’m using. Ie if i play a game to only shows wasd plus tool keys. And those tools keys to be renamed to whatever their purpose is.
> customiseable keyboard i want is one made of glass - a screen like macbook’s touchbar
Other than using a tablet as a keyboard (I guess), I've seen keyboards like https://fluxkeyboard.com/ which sorta seem to go for this "customize the labels based on what I'm doing".
IMO, though... your hands are covering the keycaps. If you have to look down at the keyboard to see the labels, it's going to be more cumbersome than just presenting a toolbar on the screen.
Colemak was just released when I decided to switch to a better keyboard layout to prevent a return to RSI. I looked into rolling my own based on statistics.
I didn't care if it would look like QWERTY, if I needed to switch cold turkey for my health or future comfort I'd do so.
I decided to use the tried and true DVORAK and tweak a minimum to make it even beter; switch the U (qwerty F) and the I (qwerty G) as the I is used much more frequently in both English and Dutch. Next to being optimized for finger travel the DVORAK layout has more so called 'hand alteration' during typing due to the vowels being on the left.
It took months before I was 'up to speed'. I thought I would type significantly faster, but that is'nt the case as I often think slower then that I can type. It's much more about comfort.
I don't regret it, it really is more comfortable. I switch between QWERTY and DVORAK-IU often so I am bilingual. Typing in alphabetic shorthand (for example Yash) with yet another optimized layout is another possibility. Or Yash with morse code or braille mapped like chording or just chording.
https://www.artofchording.com/layout/chorded-keyboard.html
Soon we will be talking to our LLM's a lot, so it's not a real big deal, but the nerd in me likes to optimize. Still I think, perhaps I could have designed the very best layout for my personal style and Dutch en English and the latest theories regarding what's more optimal (rolls, hand alteration, compression, chording). Perhaps an LLM can help? Not sure if I want to learn a new layout again. In the meantime alternating between QWERTY and DVORAK-IU suits me well.
> Soon we will be talking to our LLM's a lot, so it's not a real big deal
Regardless of how good voice interfaces get, the inherent limitations and restrictions that come with it means that we'll all still be doing a whole lot of typing until/unless a new and better input method is invented.
The only replacement for typing I can see taking over would be a mind interface, but even there I have a suspicion that it'll require 'thinking in a different voice' that'll make it almost as tiring as voice control.
I had the same thought. Maybe it would be like our internal monologue voice (which I learned not everyone has). So instead of just one in there, we'd have two.
Or maybe it would be a combination of internal voice and ephemeral voiceless conception, or maybe thinking with "intent". Whatever it would be, it would certainly take effort to some degree.
I don't know about anyone else, obviously, but my internal monologue is very poorly focused at times, I can be mentally editing code and suddenly think about donuts, or squirrels.
Maybe AI could filter that nonsense out based on contextual clues, but not the AI we have so far, hence I think the monologue would need that second voice. 'Remember Nikki, think all code things and only code things in scottish... Aye, I shall.... och, bollocks!'
Accuracy isn't one of them, because that's not something inherent to using voice as an interface. I'm thinking of aspects that are inherent to communicating by voice at all, not even related to machines understanding it.
Such as... voice is really awful at communicating with great precision and exactness. It can certainly be used for that, but it rapidly becomes tedious and very time-consuming. Using a keyboard is faster, more accurate, and more convenient for that sort of thing.
Accuracy incurs secondary problems today; in my experience, I type slower than I can talk, but I type much faster than I can talk to a computer and have any hope of being understood. Now, I do have high-ish hopes that this problem will be rendered obsolete in the next few years, but it remains a problem so far. The other thing that occurs to me is sort of connected and also something that might be fixed soon; I can type arbitrary symbols and words that aren't in the dictionary with no extra overhead, and I don't trust a machine to handle that. However, I suspect that sufficiently accurate voice-to-text combined with even current LLMs may be up to the task of handling that, so this whole comment really might boil down to "give it 5 years and we'll see".
People have been saying this for decades. I think of "dragon naturally speaking" and similar. It still doesn't seem mainstream. (maybe it is but not visible to me?)
I simply don't like a speech-based interface, but I think it's unfair to compare STT tech from even a few years ago to something like Whisper. It's dramatically improved in both accuracy and speed.
The only one I’ve seriously considered is to open the mechanical keyboard market for me as a Nordic ISO layout user by using the Swerty layout: https://johanegustafsson.net/projects/swerty/
There is a FAR greater custom keyboard market with ANSI layouts and that one is exactly that. ANSI layout for the traditionally ISO Nordic languages.
I use QWERTY layout on Ergodox with some keys removed. Moving symbols to a separate layer and Esc to Caps Lock position was enough to relieve my hands.
I smashed the screen on my phone one time and this piece of tech that could summon a car was useless. I was stuck/had to figure out a bus system, was hungover so it was bad. I was thinking of vibration input.
I still rely on/envision the standard qwerty layout
I been using qwerty since the IBM PC XT where a thing. Before that my mother tauch me to type in eletronic typewriters. It's a terrible layout for Portuguese, ok for english, but but I spent so many years perfecting the necessary motor skills to use it that I would prefer to lose a hand than type in anything else now.
If all I did was type on my own private keyboars maybe I would consider another layout. But since I spend quite some time on other people's computers it is not worth the brain-knots that happen when switching.
I do a custom layout to get the diacritic non-English letters from my "proper local" layout but all the special characters/symbols as per US keyboard, since the "proper local" layout has them moved around for some reason. That was annoying, so many years ago I spent the 15 minutes to prepare the layout files and then I just need to install them on every new computer I get.
I am not faster than I am on QWERTY when using my built in Macbook keyboard. But man, is it way more comfy. I did manage to recovery from some serious wrist pain I was getting when using QWERTY and the standard layout. So I will stick with a split ortho keyboard and Workman for now.
Before anyone mentions it, I did try Colemak and Colemak-DH and I didn't like either. They just didn't sink in the same way that Workman did. I think the Workman home row is more comfortable to me.
i think the ship has sailed on qwerty for me, but it's hard to deny the benefits of a thumb cluster keyboard. i've had a kinesis advantage sitting on my desk for a couple of months but have yet to figure out the best way to remap the thumb cluster for emacs. and the days when my wrist hurts enough to motivate me to try using it are the days i definitely, definitely don't have time to have my productivity crippled by my silly keyboard.
For Emacs with Kinesis (or Glove80), move Control and Alt where the arrow keys are. I have been using it that way for quite a while, and it has been working great.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadI used it for around a year, but I'm back to qwerty now, specifically on a low-profile keyboard with red switches from aliexpress.
Pros:
- Some people think it's cool
- It's interesting to do it
- It's fun getting fast at typing on a new layout
Cons:
- Most people think it's weird
- It can get expensive
- Although I was eventually able to switch quite seamlessly between my layout and qwerty, for a few months my qwerty skills were very bad.
- If you don't want to carry it to and from work, you need 2 keyboards, or suffer two layouts
- When typing I sometimes found myself thinking about the keyboard and layout rather than what I was writing
- There's no ergonomic benefit that I could see, but I don't have any problems with normal keyboards
I also went back, partly 'getting back up to speed' frustration and partially because I'm really not sure what I was going to get out of it. After almost 40 years with qwerty keyboards ... it doesn't seem like i'm going to get that much benefit if there is even a measurable benefit.
https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q1-pro-qmk-via-wi...
This layout seems cool though I'm pretty sure you could find one w/o the f-frow.
I've gone with a 65 for my only 'flat' board. https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k2-pro-qmk-via-wi...
You might be able to find one with the hhkb 'missing molars'..
HHKB/Realforce did make a hhkb lite with inverted-t arrows in 2001... you can see it on this page: https://hhkeyboard.us/about/history
The whole 'least keys possible i'm 31337 hax0r' optimization fuckery I just find hilarious.
I tried out a friends glove80... it's just kinesis but still worse, there are a few things that kinesis does. It's better than the ergo-dox because keywells.. it's better than the glove 80 because of the keycap profiling. I do think the profiling on the 360 is a little worse than the older advantage 1/2 but it's pretty good. .. but like the glove 80 all the keycaps are the same height from the switch and it's not great.
(to give props advantage basically stole from maltron but the build quality on those is so so shitty.. vacuform cases sometimes)
On most typical keyboards, your thumbs only get to press one huge spacebar. (Which means for keys like shift, enter, backspace, the hands need to move, or the pinkies need to stretch).
Whereas, most of these "31337 hax0r" keyboards allow each thumb to use two or three keys each. With that, the thumbs can then use backspace/enter/etc. without the fingers having to stretch, or hands having to move.
Putting very commonly used charters on a modifier and probably two modifiers (layer+shift is common to get to a third layer) for keyboards with ~40 or under keys is connotative overhead for quite a while no matter how you cut it.
Sure, but it's a different cost, rather than an additional cost.
Any key that's not within reach of your hands at rest on home row, your hands will either need to move, or your fingers will need to stretch to reach them.
The sub-40-key keyboards trade-off the cost of a more sophisticated keymap, for the benefit of bringing the full functionality of the keyboard within reach of the hands.
I kept qwerty but moved each half outward so g and h are now where f and j used to be. From there I moved all of the outer keys to the two new columns in the center, plus a few other tweaks. Got enter on the corner so it's a palm-press.
If I use a normal keyboard my pinkys start to hurt again, goes away when I switch back to my custom one.
After some time we had some touch typing in classes at school and it was so painful trying to have my hands square on. So I just ignored that whole thing and continued my style.
Never had any issues.
In particular I learned to cook both professionally and for my own benefit and I discovered around professional kitchen that cooks are taught many stupid things that are mostly about covering somebody's ass for security or enforcing an inefficient way of working to keep people busy. You would be amazed how little relevance the pro cook learning has to the actual completion of the task efficiently; in fact they would often gain so much efficiency if they learned to let go of their learned behaviors.
Another pet peeve of mine is the requirement of "warming up" before sports like running or the like. In my youth, every single sports teacher of mine pissed me off by requiring this nonsense even though I really felt it was at best a waste of time and even counterproductive. And now we actually have studies that prove this as a fact, which would have been clear to someone who is not completely incompetent. Also, I have the performance numbers to back this up nowadays, so I am not taking any more of this nonsense.
In general, I feel it is sometimes hard to explain nicely to people that their limitations do not necessarily apply to everyone; it gets pretty hard to patiently listen to peoples that are clearly mediocre trying to teach you how to do stuff even though they are not very successful at the task they are teaching.
None of them helped. Surprisingly the thing that helped was getting a really good chair (I recommend a second hand HM Mira; don't get anything that sells itself as "ergonomic"), and a really deep desk so you can properly rest your forearms on the desk.
With that my RSI went away completely, even with a totally plain qwerty keyboard.
Dvorak was definitely nicer than QWERTY but when you add up...
1. You know qwerty. You'll probably never be as fast with Dvorak.
2. Ever want to type on any other keyboard in the world again? Yeah good luck. You will underestimate how often you type on coworkers' keyboards.
3. Ever use keyboard shortcuts? Well now they're awful.
... it definitely isn't worth it.
But speed is just a matter of experience. I don't know if I'm faster on Dvorak, but a speed that is really hammering keys in Qwerty feels comparatively effortless in Dvorak.
I think I can be faster on Dvorak because I type less quickly and with more comfort to reach the same level.
In terms of speed: I learned Dvorak, then went back to QWERTY. I returned to Dvorak a few years ago, and can now be faster with Dvorak than I was with QWERTY.
Are the other HM chairs any better?
I'd say this points more to "it's necessary to retain QWERTY".
Slightly bigger problem is if others want to type on your keyboard; you need to be able to switch it to QWERTY easily.
> Ever use keyboard shortcuts?
Yeah, this one does count against Dvorak.
Similarly, with mouse & keyboard stuff like Blender or CAD, you'll need to actually recall the letters are; which is different than when you've got two hands on the keyboard.
The main other things I'd say which count against Dvorak is that it will take some time to learn; and probably your motor-memory will be awful while learning it (so typing on any keyboard will be slow and error prone).
Still, I'm glad with the increase in comfort I got from learning Dvorak. (And these days I'm faster with Dvorak than I was with my undisciplined QWERTY).
I can type still type on a regular keyboard with qwerty perfectly well.
> Ever use keyboard shortcuts? Well now they're awful.
Nah, you just have to keep that in consideration when designing the layout. Colemak keeps the most important ones in the same place, and the layout in OP has a dedicated shortcut layer for the ones not in a comfortable spot.
I could see myself getting into it if I only had to bother with a single layout, but since I deal with three different layouts on a daily basis, no way.
On Linux and Mac it's no issue to input both using Dvorak.
On Android, however, none of the Chinese input methods support Dvorak so I had to decompile and modify Google Pinyin's APK and rearrange the XML layout files to Dvorak.
https://github.com/dheera/android-googlepinyin-dvorak
I never learned QWERTY, so I'm extremely bad at typing with it even on a phone, regardless of language.
While I can still function on a full-size QWERTY keyboard on account of using them regularly, I almost never pick up someone else's phone, so my thumbs have forgotten it entirely.
It is annoying that Windows keeps Qwerty for it while Mac uses Dvorak. If it was just consistent (I constantly switch machines) it would be easy to handle and entirely subconscious by now...
But I start typing the wrong layout every time and lose a few seconds mentally reorienting myself.
https://medium.com/@jiayu./how-to-set-your-pinyin-ime-keyboa...
Of course if you want the most efficient (you first have to decide on the factors, and the most efficient combination) layout for each language of the most efficient for the average of each language you can have a nice hobby for a year. I was afraid I'd end up with an esoteric layout and then after a few years find out that there was a better layout and I would learn that one all over again. Instead I decided to stick with DVORAK with an improvement tweak so it would be also more or less be usable on Android en iOS.
I found it hard to switch layouts, I'm using only one with layers. On first layer there are english letters, second layer there are accents (a → á) and some symbols where accent is missing (m → +). On third layer there are arrows on home row and functional keys. Shift without other key is `(`, on second layer `{`. There are some additional keys at the bottom and middle, they cover the rest of symbols. Outliers are mapped to start editor, browser, ctrl+c, ctrl+z, volume, mute, …
I really like having a single layout. I don't like that I'm no longer able to type on QWERTY without looking at keys. On my desktop, I'm 10 % faster, on any other computer I'm 90 % slower. Would I do it again? Probably yes.
Because English and simple ASCII made such a nice team, just wondering, not trying to say anything diabolically odious or even ďábelské ódy
(I was making a macaronic joke, didn't look up the translation of that till after, but it was perfect! "devilish odes")
What you could do is to replace an accent with an ASCII character. Compare the name of town Český Těšín with its Polish equivalent Czeski Cieszyn (Č → Cz, ě → ie, š → sz). Actually, this is how we got here, 600 years ago Jan Hus (John the Goose) added diacritics to shorten a few diagrams in written language.
- Diacritics, for example in German, make writing and reading easier than English and you cannot have ghoti[1]
- Diacritics, is an easy way to avoid di-grams and tri-grams: English has "sh", Czech has "š" (it's not a decoration, it has a true meaning)
- ASCII seems to make a nice team with English because it's an American creation. Should English had some accents that ASCII would have included them, like dollar sign (this is an "S" with a stroke…)[2]
- Languages that could go with out vowels are those where words forms have no ambiguity. In English, "bt" for example is ambiguous because there's "bit", "bat", "but", "boat", etc.
So you are just having a ethnocentric point of view, that's human.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign
For me, moving to a programmable keyboard and using a non-QWERTY keyboard has 100% been worth it
[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey
This isn't a common feature, but I've seen that Dumang keyboards can do this.
https://www.velocifiretech.com/products/dumang-dk6-ergo-v2?v...
> customiseable keyboard i want is one made of glass - a screen like macbook’s touchbar
Other than using a tablet as a keyboard (I guess), I've seen keyboards like https://fluxkeyboard.com/ which sorta seem to go for this "customize the labels based on what I'm doing".
IMO, though... your hands are covering the keycaps. If you have to look down at the keyboard to see the labels, it's going to be more cumbersome than just presenting a toolbar on the screen.
It took months before I was 'up to speed'. I thought I would type significantly faster, but that is'nt the case as I often think slower then that I can type. It's much more about comfort. I don't regret it, it really is more comfortable. I switch between QWERTY and DVORAK-IU often so I am bilingual. Typing in alphabetic shorthand (for example Yash) with yet another optimized layout is another possibility. Or Yash with morse code or braille mapped like chording or just chording. https://www.artofchording.com/layout/chorded-keyboard.html
Soon we will be talking to our LLM's a lot, so it's not a real big deal, but the nerd in me likes to optimize. Still I think, perhaps I could have designed the very best layout for my personal style and Dutch en English and the latest theories regarding what's more optimal (rolls, hand alteration, compression, chording). Perhaps an LLM can help? Not sure if I want to learn a new layout again. In the meantime alternating between QWERTY and DVORAK-IU suits me well.
Regardless of how good voice interfaces get, the inherent limitations and restrictions that come with it means that we'll all still be doing a whole lot of typing until/unless a new and better input method is invented.
Or maybe it would be a combination of internal voice and ephemeral voiceless conception, or maybe thinking with "intent". Whatever it would be, it would certainly take effort to some degree.
Maybe AI could filter that nonsense out based on contextual clues, but not the AI we have so far, hence I think the monologue would need that second voice. 'Remember Nikki, think all code things and only code things in scottish... Aye, I shall.... och, bollocks!'
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224s/project/reports_2017/P...
https://annals-csis.org/Volume_11/drp/pdf/153.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
What sort of limitations/restrictions do you see with it, beyond accuracy (which is continually improving)?
Such as... voice is really awful at communicating with great precision and exactness. It can certainly be used for that, but it rapidly becomes tedious and very time-consuming. Using a keyboard is faster, more accurate, and more convenient for that sort of thing.
People have been saying this for decades. I think of "dragon naturally speaking" and similar. It still doesn't seem mainstream. (maybe it is but not visible to me?)
that said, I still remember this video:
https://youtu.be/YKuRkGkf5HU
On the bright side, it will settle the debate on tabs vs. spaces once and for all.
There is a FAR greater custom keyboard market with ANSI layouts and that one is exactly that. ANSI layout for the traditionally ISO Nordic languages.
https://configure.zsa.io/ergodox-ez/layouts/40EJq/latest/0/2...
I smashed the screen on my phone one time and this piece of tech that could summon a car was useless. I was stuck/had to figure out a bus system, was hungover so it was bad. I was thinking of vibration input.
I still rely on/envision the standard qwerty layout
Those rock wrist rests are fancy
I been using qwerty since the IBM PC XT where a thing. Before that my mother tauch me to type in eletronic typewriters. It's a terrible layout for Portuguese, ok for english, but but I spent so many years perfecting the necessary motor skills to use it that I would prefer to lose a hand than type in anything else now.
I actually just passed my one year anniversary using the "Workman" layout on an ErgoDox EZ. I also eventually added home row mods. My current layout is here: https://configure.zsa.io/ergodox-ez/layouts/aPAE5/latest/0
I am not faster than I am on QWERTY when using my built in Macbook keyboard. But man, is it way more comfy. I did manage to recovery from some serious wrist pain I was getting when using QWERTY and the standard layout. So I will stick with a split ortho keyboard and Workman for now.
Before anyone mentions it, I did try Colemak and Colemak-DH and I didn't like either. They just didn't sink in the same way that Workman did. I think the Workman home row is more comfortable to me.