5 ms·

I respectfully disagree. In normal typing, I don't consider a capital "I" to be significantly more taxing than a lowercase "i". Relatedly, I think there's a rea

I respectfully disagree. In normal typing, I don't consider a capital "I" to be significantly more taxing than a lowercase "i". Relatedly, I think there's a reason that I've never heard an argument about why we should prefer square brackets over parentheses (square brackets require no shift while parentheses do). Right off the bat, I notice that when I'm quoting something using double quotes or placing something in parentheses or curly braces, I don't even have to think about pressing shift. I type them just as quickly as any other punctuation. So I don't think there's much validity to this argument based solely on keystrokes.

krylon 11y ago
> square brackets require no shift while parentheses do On a German keyboard, parentheses require a shift, but to get square brackets, one needs to hit AltGr (or "Option" on a Mac keyboard) which quickly gets annoying if one has to do it a lot. Except for that, I agree with you.
- therein 11y ago
  But I thought "We're all living in Amerika, Amerika ist wunderbar"...
wtbob 11y ago
> Relatedly, I think there's a reason that I've never heard an argument about why we should prefer square brackets over parentheses (square brackets require no shift while parentheses do). FWIW, I switch parens and square brackets for exactly that reason. It'd be great if distros offered this as an option, but I know my way around xkb enough to do this much.
bufordsharkley 11y ago
I'm an outlier-- I hate chording so much that I use Caps Lock instead of the Shift key. (I'm in the company of the world's fastest typer...) I haven't gone so far as to hack the system to allow Caps Lock to enable the colon and other punctuation, but I've long considered it. ...So for me, two periods is a million times better than a colon.
- bufordsharkley 11y ago
  I get downvoted every time I mention this, but I'll live with it-- I want to recruit people to typing with caps lock (especially vim users, already used to modal typing).

krylon 11y ago

> square brackets require no shift while parentheses do On a German keyboard, parentheses require a shift, but to get square brackets, one needs to hit AltGr (or "Option" on a Mac keyboard) which quickly gets annoying if one has to do it a lot. Except for that, I agree with you.

therein 11y ago
But I thought "We're all living in Amerika, Amerika ist wunderbar"...

wtbob 11y ago

> Relatedly, I think there's a reason that I've never heard an argument about why we should prefer square brackets over parentheses (square brackets require no shift while parentheses do). FWIW, I switch parens and square brackets for exactly that reason. It'd be great if distros offered this as an option, but I know my way around xkb enough to do this much.

bufordsharkley 11y ago

I'm an outlier-- I hate chording so much that I use Caps Lock instead of the Shift key. (I'm in the company of the world's fastest typer...) I haven't gone so far as to hack the system to allow Caps Lock to enable the colon and other punctuation, but I've long considered it. ...So for me, two periods is a million times better than a colon.

bufordsharkley 11y ago
I get downvoted every time I mention this, but I'll live with it-- I want to recruit people to typing with caps lock (especially vim users, already used to modal typing).