3 ms·

Also semicolon and P, minimal change, big gains.

fwlr 4y ago
Another type of change to consider is flipping shift for an individual key: semicolon/colon (if your language isn’t semicolon terminated, you probably type colon way more) hyphen/underscore (if your language doesn’t have arrow functions or kebab casing, you probably type underscore a lot more) singlequote/doublequote (the preeminent style guide for your language probably has an opinion on which quote character to use; that should be your non-shift character) pipe/backslash (pipe operators are heavily used in some languages, but escaping characters is common too) The first shift swap I tried was actually tilde/backtick, but I didn’t like it - turns out I use string templating in JS more often than I need to reference the home directory. Outside of direct swaps, one related change I have made recently is using Karabiner to set up custom commands for “modifier key pressed and released alone”. Tap left shift by itself for an opening parenthesis, right shift for closing parenthesis. Command does bracket and option does braces in a similar fashion. I’m liking it so far, once I get familiar enough that I’m not using the old way I’ll remap the original [/{ and ]/} keys to some other symbols - whichever of %^*#!@$& I use most often, probably. In general though I would highly encourage anyone who types for a living to consider making incremental key swaps instead of changing keyboard layouts. For Mac there is Ukelele (GUI, generates new layout file your OS uses) or Karabiner (config file, daemon intercepts keystrokes and carries out substitutions - more power but you have to be okay with “intercepts keystrokes”). For Linux the functionality is there with localectl and loadkeys, and there’s probably many utilities built on top of that. For Windows there is SharpKeys, PowerToys, and AutoHotKeys. (I don’t use Linux or Windows day to day, there may be better options here).

fwlr 4y ago

Another type of change to consider is flipping shift for an individual key: semicolon/colon (if your language isn’t semicolon terminated, you probably type colon way more) hyphen/underscore (if your language doesn’t have arrow functions or kebab casing, you probably type underscore a lot more) singlequote/doublequote (the preeminent style guide for your language probably has an opinion on which quote character to use; that should be your non-shift character) pipe/backslash (pipe operators are heavily used in some languages, but escaping characters is common too) The first shift swap I tried was actually tilde/backtick, but I didn’t like it - turns out I use string templating in JS more often than I need to reference the home directory. Outside of direct swaps, one related change I have made recently is using Karabiner to set up custom commands for “modifier key pressed and released alone”. Tap left shift by itself for an opening parenthesis, right shift for closing parenthesis. Command does bracket and option does braces in a similar fashion. I’m liking it so far, once I get familiar enough that I’m not using the old way I’ll remap the original [/{ and ]/} keys to some other symbols - whichever of %^*#!@$& I use most often, probably. In general though I would highly encourage anyone who types for a living to consider making incremental key swaps instead of changing keyboard layouts. For Mac there is Ukelele (GUI, generates new layout file your OS uses) or Karabiner (config file, daemon intercepts keystrokes and carries out substitutions - more power but you have to be okay with “intercepts keystrokes”). For Linux the functionality is there with localectl and loadkeys, and there’s probably many utilities built on top of that. For Windows there is SharpKeys, PowerToys, and AutoHotKeys. (I don’t use Linux or Windows day to day, there may be better options here).