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There are several aspects to keyboard interfaces that the article does not catch: - The physical device: - The "key board": Keys that are aligned in stra

by sshine 3y ago

There are several aspects to keyboard interfaces that the article does not catch: - The physical device: - The "key board": Keys that are aligned in straight lines are not aligned with your hands. - The wrist bend affects people differently and can cause strains - Physical design to lower wrist strain is an almost entirely separate research area than optimal keyboard layout. - The optimal physical input device (in terms of input bandwidth) is hand-shaped but is more difficult to make. - The layout: - This article only discusses permutations of letters for increased bandwidth and less strain. - Considering computer users can "easily" reach 80-120 wpm with QWERTY, speed is a moot point for non-competitioners. - Few people learn a new layout and have a confirmation bias when they do; real usage data is scarce. Real-world experience differs slightly; e.g. I have more race conditions on Dvorak than on QWERTY because of left/right-hand speed differences. Dvorak does succeed at distributing consecutive letters between the hands, but I never had problems with accidental twiddles on QWERTY. Would you rather be fast or accurate? For most people, the trade-off is somewhere in the middle. The layout is about much more than permutations of letters. Anyone who tried to or aspires to run Kmonad, Kanata, or Neo2 or who have a window manager with custom keybindings that control their environment, or who type with more than one kind of keyboard (e.g. pinyin, cyrillic, greek), or who need to type special unicode symbols that don't have a key combo in traditional layouts (math, emoji): The bar for keyboard input is higher, and I don't know any project that attempts to unify these. My "keyboard" is a combination of many open source tools, some of which work better than others, others have a steep learning curve, yet others are only documented in foreign languages. [0]: https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad [1]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata https://github.com/jtroo/kanata [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_(keyboard_layout) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_(keyboard_layout) [3]: https://www.neo-layout.org/ https://www.neo-layout.org/

cout 3y ago
Race conditions are a good point. I remember on DOS I had a batch file DRI.BAT because I would often type DRI or IDR instead of DIR. Oddly I have no problem with ls and rarely type sl even though L and S are hit with different hands; either my typing has improved or there is something different about those key positions.
- sshine 3y ago
  There is a Linux package called `sl` that launches a steam locomotive ASCII animation to annoy the typer. :-P I think the difference might be that three letters is less of a conscious and more of a motoric action, e.g. you get the first letter for free.

by sshine 3y ago

cout 3y ago

Race conditions are a good point. I remember on DOS I had a batch file DRI.BAT because I would often type DRI or IDR instead of DIR. Oddly I have no problem with ls and rarely type sl even though L and S are hit with different hands; either my typing has improved or there is something different about those key positions.

sshine 3y ago
There is a Linux package called `sl` that launches a steam locomotive ASCII animation to annoy the typer. :-P I think the difference might be that three letters is less of a conscious and more of a motoric action, e.g. you get the first letter for free.