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I, myself, went down a similar rabbit hole years ago. I could probably write a similarly long blog post, detailing all the twists and turns, highs and lows of t
by meken 6y ago
I, myself, went down a similar rabbit hole years ago. I could probably write a similarly long blog post, detailing all the twists and turns, highs and lows of that period. Reading this was kinda triggering some repressed PTSD from it lol.
The highs and lows, thinking that you've found the perfect layout, only to encounter an edge case which there's no solution for and giving up. The continual wishful thinking that "one more modification" and THEN I would have the perfect layout, without ever knowing if that's true. And then when do you stop? I couldn't find a point where I would ever stop, it was maddening. I used a Japanese keyboard for a while [1] to leverage the extra keys on either side of space bar, but then I realized that I probably wouldn't be able to use a laptop normally ever again, which was enough to snap me back to QWERTY.
In the end, I did end up going back to QWERTY, but with some modifications, which I really think improve the problems I have with the layout (sore pinkies) [2], most commonly from jupyter notebooks (hitting shift-enter). It also solves emacs pinky.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/SolidTek-Keyboard-Languages-JAPANESE-Bilingual/dp/B004RPQ8KU https://www.amazon.com/SolidTek-Keyboard-Languages-JAPANESE-...
[2] - https://github.com/ebanner/dotfiles#keyboard-layout https://github.com/ebanner/dotfiles#keyboard-layout
- coryrc 6y agoHow do you type 2?
- meken 6y agoAh, good question. Alt + 2 gets you 2. If you press 2 by itself, then you get tab. A similar thing with 3. If you press 3 and release it, you get 3. If you hold 3 and press another key k, then you get Ctrl+k. This works by using the "to_if_alone" feature in karabiner. e.g. https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/json/typical-complex-modifications-examples/#post-escape-if-left_control-is-pressed-alone https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/json/typical-comple...
- Timpy 6y agoI experimented with putting replacing some of the number row, I replaced 9 with backspace. It never occurred to me to put the ctrl/alt/shift family up there though, that's really genius.