5 ms·

The keyboard layout project

34 points by alter8 14y ago

dsego 14y ago
How about this - The Workman Keyboard Layout http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-different-philosophy-in-designing-keyboard-layouts/ http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-differe... But the layout is just one of the problems. The key staggering is also not very ergonomic. There are two cool keyboards featuring symmetric key positioning: - Truly ergonomic keyboard http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php - Type matrix http://typematrix.com http://typematrix.com
- mistercow 14y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you have any references to support non-staggered keys are superior? I ask because (100 - ε)% of claims about ergonomics are completely unsupported by scientific research.
  - blackRust 14y ago
    (100 - ε)% I like this very much. Another more accurate description that comes to mind is describing where you live: CountryA XOR CountryB
  - dsego 14y ago
    Not really. But you can take a look at Maltron keyboards, which are non-staggered and also curved. From what I can find on the web it seems that they have done some research.
    - MTGandP 14y ago
      The [Kinesis](http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/) Advantage is a cheaper alternative to Maltron that follows the same design pattern. It's the keyboard I use, and it's definitely more comfortable than a typical staggered keyboard, or even a simpler ergonomic keyboard.
- gokfar 14y ago
  - ErgoDox: split, non-staggered, programmable, mechanical, all-around awesome. http://ergodox.org/ http://ergodox.org/ It should roll around before the end of the year, group buy happens at http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=22780.0 http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=22780.0 As for layout, I suggest Colemak with a custom alt layer such as http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?pid=5001#p5001 http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?pid=5001#p5001
- mifrai 14y ago
  I personally don't suggest the truly ergonomic. While it's well designed from the outset, the underpinnings are a bit lacking. The existing firmware is buggy and has issues with Mac; and the programmable software has been promised for a while now but was never delivered. To boot, the company's support is nearly non-existent, except for - thankfully - their return process. As mentioned by gokfar, I really look forward to the ergodox group buy
- MTGandP 14y ago
  Author of The Keyboard Layout Project here. I'm familiar with Workman; it's a reasonably strong attempt, but I think it has a number of problems and fails to perform as well as Colemak or my own layouts. If you compare Workman and MTGAP 3.14 (shown [here](http://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress.com/the-keyboard-layout-project/) http://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress.com/the-keyboard-layo...) using [my keyboard evaluator](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing), MTGAP 3.14 performs better on every single statistic except finger work. (You can see all of the different statistics explained on [my GitHub page](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing/blob/master/Fitness https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing/blob/master/Fitness). I didn't post them all here because it takes up too much space, but if you want, you can pull the program and to the comparison yourself.)
batgaijin 14y ago
I was kind of hoping this would be a petition for keyboard manufacturers... I still don't get how shitty keyboards are still included in laptops and keyboard designs. I mean I remember using one keyboard with a backspace key the size of a number key and one where the restart button was near home.
mistercow 14y ago
For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed. So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the part of the keyboard that you would optimize for. Typing 5 minutes a day at a relaxed pace would be enough time to cover each of those 8 times in a month, so collecting enough data to work with would be feasible pretty quickly. I was then going to take a big textual corpus of English, and the total of all transition times would serve as the fitness function. I had the data collection program done, and was starting to collect data, when I decided I should redo it with triples (of which there are 35,937). Then the length of the data collection process I was looking at became really daunting, and I lost interest in the project. What I'd quite like to do, though, would be to crowdsource the data collection using a web app. Then I could get good three-key data and not have it biased to my own personal quirks.
- techiferous 14y ago
  Being a dvorak user, I must say, the "rolls" are extremely comfortable and fun. I love typing the words church, tenth, school, etc.
  - MTGandP 14y ago
    That's why my keyboard layouts try to optimize for rolls more than any other layout I've seen. The most recent version has a number of very nice rolls, TH, IN, ST, and some other less-frequent digraphs.
- Cilvic 14y ago
  I'm building KeyRocket bascially to help people get better with software from their behavior. I love the idea of making everybody transition to a better layout letter by letter and we could help with the data collection if it respects/protects people's privacy. What do you mean that there are 1,089 transitions?
- MTGandP 14y ago
moonboots 14y ago
I question whether these keyboard layouts are ideal for programmers. On Qwerty, Colemak, Dvorak, and Workman, the symbol keys are pushed to the periphery of the keyboard. To improve practical typing efficiency, I created and use http://typing.io http://typing.io, which allows you to type real code instead of prose.
- vinodkd 14y ago
  Nice interface, although it took me a moment to figure out that the orange background was the caret. One nit, however: although I'm a touch typist (having learnt typing on a typewriter), I've long since trained myself to type the braces together and then cursor-left to fill in the details. This I do for ()'s, {}'s, []'s and <>'s; as well as quotes. Similarly I type the C-style /* * / comments as the pair of /'s first, cursor-left, then two *'s, cursor left and finally the comment text. It started out in this mode only when I wrote code, but now I find myself doing the same even with normal text. Not sure how many there are like me (a senior early in my novice days showed me the practice and it stuck), but it always seemed like a simple way to ensure no dangling parens (assuming you're using "just an editor" like I do). Could you allow for cursor-lefts to correct instead of just backspace?
  - moonboots 14y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. Occasionally I also find myself typing opening brace, closing brace, left arrow, inner text, and right arrow. However, it's very inefficient to jump to the arrow keys, so I want to discourage this typing pattern. To keep braces/quotes balanced, I've been using editor plugins like smartinput[1] and paredit[2] that automatically insert closing symbols. Even with the assistance, I've found it's easiest to continue typing through the closing symbols (as opposed to right arrowing). The javascript is also less hairy without needing to handle typing braces together:) [1] http://thechangelog.com/post/20172996073/vim-smartinput-smarter-punctuation-pairs-in-vim http://thechangelog.com/post/20172996073/vim-smartinput-smar... [2] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  Agreed. I'd like to try the colemak layout, but the various brackets and braces need to be handy for programming. Say what you will about qwerty, but at least on the US version the punctuation is decent and reasonably logical on the right.
guylhem 14y ago
Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed? The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at least 5 times better and easy to learn (less than 1 day), just for people to "consider" it due to the migration costs. Fun story- I come from France, where everybody uses the azerty layout for some copyright reasons initially IIRC (qwerty was copyrighted, but if you switched some letters around it suddenly was not copyright infringement) and now for historical reason. In high school, after examining the situation, I quickly decided to go with qwerty for some simple reasons : - easier to find on new hardware (say, laptop, smartphone with a physical keyboard, etc) - large software support (in the bios, now uefi, - not a single thing to change) - good enough support for 8 bit chars (Brazilian Portuguese layout, us international, "canadien normalise"....) - quick transition to different national layout (I'll be lost for some days, mostly for the commas and periods, but then I will be quickly productive) You know the saying - you can't change others. You can only change yourself. So I figured out the best hack was to hack my tastes, not the keyboard ;-) qwerty might be 1 to 5% less optimal than something else - let's even say 10%. But being suported on 100% of the hardware and software makes all the difference. Now when I need some hardware on ebay I'm sure I'll find a good qwerty solution. My french friends bitch and moan about the lack of azerty support, and the trouble it is for them to manage different keyboard layouts in their head. I wonder if that's the same for dvorak layout users.
- flixic 14y ago
  Hardware is not a problem. Here I am, typing these words with Colemak layout on qwerty keyboard. Software, on the other hand, is a slight annoyance. Colemak (and any other keyboard layout) can easily be available in pretty much any OS except iOS. Also, many games implement their own keyboard input handling, and disregards custom layouts.
  - guylhem 14y ago
    Hardware is the problem is you want the figures on your keys to match what they do. (I love such "tiny" details). In the past I did try various kind of stickers, since it was hard to find my preferred qwerty layout (canadien normalise), but they were just a nuisance. So I changed to a apple canadian qwerty layout (not many differences), it's just perfect - hardware support and software support out of the box. And whenever I get a us qwerty I can still be efficient.
chime 14y ago
If anyone's interested, I embarked on a similar project for one-finger typing for users with motor disabilities: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110228 http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110228
cmccabe 14y ago
I don't think QWERTY is as bad as it has been portrayed. See http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
hso9791 14y ago
As some already have pointed out, internationalization can be somewhat tricky on alternative keyboard layouts. As it is, I find that languages with extra letters often move some extra symbols (like {[]}) into combinations with peripheral keys, thus making coding a chore as compared to on US keyboards. What I would like to see is if anybody has a good way of getting rid of both the "key" and "board" part of keyboards. Electronics and manufacturing is so cheap today that this could be feasible to produce on a large scale. For those who have a sense of rhythm, I'm thinking a combination of twisting/pushing/tapping/whatever moves that in combination would indicate a given symbol. This would take some focused effort to learn, but after that... The form factor could be a ball, a pair of gloves, a combination with pedals, a guitar-like thing, whatever. Keyboards would make a cheap fallback in settings where such a contraption would be inappropriate. Has anyone else thought of something similar?

34 points by alter8 14y ago

dsego 14y ago

How about this - The Workman Keyboard Layout http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-different-philosophy-in-designing-keyboard-layouts/ http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-differe... But the layout is just one of the problems. The key staggering is also not very ergonomic. There are two cool keyboards featuring symmetric key positioning: - Truly ergonomic keyboard http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php - Type matrix http://typematrix.com http://typematrix.com

mistercow 14y ago
Out of curiosity, do you have any references to support non-staggered keys are superior? I ask because (100 - ε)% of claims about ergonomics are completely unsupported by scientific research.
- blackRust 14y ago
  (100 - ε)% I like this very much. Another more accurate description that comes to mind is describing where you live: CountryA XOR CountryB
- dsego 14y ago
  Not really. But you can take a look at Maltron keyboards, which are non-staggered and also curved. From what I can find on the web it seems that they have done some research.
  - MTGandP 14y ago
    The [Kinesis](http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/) Advantage is a cheaper alternative to Maltron that follows the same design pattern. It's the keyboard I use, and it's definitely more comfortable than a typical staggered keyboard, or even a simpler ergonomic keyboard.
gokfar 14y ago
- ErgoDox: split, non-staggered, programmable, mechanical, all-around awesome. http://ergodox.org/ http://ergodox.org/ It should roll around before the end of the year, group buy happens at http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=22780.0 http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=22780.0 As for layout, I suggest Colemak with a custom alt layer such as http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?pid=5001#p5001 http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?pid=5001#p5001
mifrai 14y ago
I personally don't suggest the truly ergonomic. While it's well designed from the outset, the underpinnings are a bit lacking. The existing firmware is buggy and has issues with Mac; and the programmable software has been promised for a while now but was never delivered. To boot, the company's support is nearly non-existent, except for - thankfully - their return process. As mentioned by gokfar, I really look forward to the ergodox group buy
MTGandP 14y ago
Author of The Keyboard Layout Project here. I'm familiar with Workman; it's a reasonably strong attempt, but I think it has a number of problems and fails to perform as well as Colemak or my own layouts. If you compare Workman and MTGAP 3.14 (shown [here](http://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress.com/the-keyboard-layout-project/) http://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress.com/the-keyboard-layo...) using [my keyboard evaluator](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing), MTGAP 3.14 performs better on every single statistic except finger work. (You can see all of the different statistics explained on [my GitHub page](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing/blob/master/Fitness https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing/blob/master/Fitness). I didn't post them all here because it takes up too much space, but if you want, you can pull the program and to the comparison yourself.)

batgaijin 14y ago

I was kind of hoping this would be a petition for keyboard manufacturers... I still don't get how shitty keyboards are still included in laptops and keyboard designs. I mean I remember using one keyboard with a backspace key the size of a number key and one where the restart button was near home.

mistercow 14y ago

For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed. So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the part of the keyboard that you would optimize for. Typing 5 minutes a day at a relaxed pace would be enough time to cover each of those 8 times in a month, so collecting enough data to work with would be feasible pretty quickly. I was then going to take a big textual corpus of English, and the total of all transition times would serve as the fitness function. I had the data collection program done, and was starting to collect data, when I decided I should redo it with triples (of which there are 35,937). Then the length of the data collection process I was looking at became really daunting, and I lost interest in the project. What I'd quite like to do, though, would be to crowdsource the data collection using a web app. Then I could get good three-key data and not have it biased to my own personal quirks.

techiferous 14y ago
Being a dvorak user, I must say, the "rolls" are extremely comfortable and fun. I love typing the words church, tenth, school, etc.
- MTGandP 14y ago
  That's why my keyboard layouts try to optimize for rolls more than any other layout I've seen. The most recent version has a number of very nice rolls, TH, IN, ST, and some other less-frequent digraphs.
Cilvic 14y ago
I'm building KeyRocket bascially to help people get better with software from their behavior. I love the idea of making everybody transition to a better layout letter by letter and we could help with the data collection if it respects/protects people's privacy. What do you mean that there are 1,089 transitions?
MTGandP 14y ago

moonboots 14y ago

I question whether these keyboard layouts are ideal for programmers. On Qwerty, Colemak, Dvorak, and Workman, the symbol keys are pushed to the periphery of the keyboard. To improve practical typing efficiency, I created and use http://typing.io http://typing.io, which allows you to type real code instead of prose.

vinodkd 14y ago
Nice interface, although it took me a moment to figure out that the orange background was the caret. One nit, however: although I'm a touch typist (having learnt typing on a typewriter), I've long since trained myself to type the braces together and then cursor-left to fill in the details. This I do for ()'s, {}'s, []'s and <>'s; as well as quotes. Similarly I type the C-style /* * / comments as the pair of /'s first, cursor-left, then two *'s, cursor left and finally the comment text. It started out in this mode only when I wrote code, but now I find myself doing the same even with normal text. Not sure how many there are like me (a senior early in my novice days showed me the practice and it stuck), but it always seemed like a simple way to ensure no dangling parens (assuming you're using "just an editor" like I do). Could you allow for cursor-lefts to correct instead of just backspace?
- moonboots 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Occasionally I also find myself typing opening brace, closing brace, left arrow, inner text, and right arrow. However, it's very inefficient to jump to the arrow keys, so I want to discourage this typing pattern. To keep braces/quotes balanced, I've been using editor plugins like smartinput[1] and paredit[2] that automatically insert closing symbols. Even with the assistance, I've found it's easiest to continue typing through the closing symbols (as opposed to right arrowing). The javascript is also less hairy without needing to handle typing braces together:) [1] http://thechangelog.com/post/20172996073/vim-smartinput-smarter-punctuation-pairs-in-vim http://thechangelog.com/post/20172996073/vim-smartinput-smar... [2] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit
mixmastamyk 14y ago
Agreed. I'd like to try the colemak layout, but the various brackets and braces need to be handy for programming. Say what you will about qwerty, but at least on the US version the punctuation is decent and reasonably logical on the right.

guylhem 14y ago

Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed? The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at least 5 times better and easy to learn (less than 1 day), just for people to "consider" it due to the migration costs. Fun story- I come from France, where everybody uses the azerty layout for some copyright reasons initially IIRC (qwerty was copyrighted, but if you switched some letters around it suddenly was not copyright infringement) and now for historical reason. In high school, after examining the situation, I quickly decided to go with qwerty for some simple reasons : - easier to find on new hardware (say, laptop, smartphone with a physical keyboard, etc) - large software support (in the bios, now uefi, - not a single thing to change) - good enough support for 8 bit chars (Brazilian Portuguese layout, us international, "canadien normalise"....) - quick transition to different national layout (I'll be lost for some days, mostly for the commas and periods, but then I will be quickly productive) You know the saying - you can't change others. You can only change yourself. So I figured out the best hack was to hack my tastes, not the keyboard ;-) qwerty might be 1 to 5% less optimal than something else - let's even say 10%. But being suported on 100% of the hardware and software makes all the difference. Now when I need some hardware on ebay I'm sure I'll find a good qwerty solution. My french friends bitch and moan about the lack of azerty support, and the trouble it is for them to manage different keyboard layouts in their head. I wonder if that's the same for dvorak layout users.

flixic 14y ago
Hardware is not a problem. Here I am, typing these words with Colemak layout on qwerty keyboard. Software, on the other hand, is a slight annoyance. Colemak (and any other keyboard layout) can easily be available in pretty much any OS except iOS. Also, many games implement their own keyboard input handling, and disregards custom layouts.
- guylhem 14y ago
  Hardware is the problem is you want the figures on your keys to match what they do. (I love such "tiny" details). In the past I did try various kind of stickers, since it was hard to find my preferred qwerty layout (canadien normalise), but they were just a nuisance. So I changed to a apple canadian qwerty layout (not many differences), it's just perfect - hardware support and software support out of the box. And whenever I get a us qwerty I can still be efficient.

chime 14y ago

If anyone's interested, I embarked on a similar project for one-finger typing for users with motor disabilities: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110228 http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110228

cmccabe 14y ago

I don't think QWERTY is as bad as it has been portrayed. See http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

hso9791 14y ago

As some already have pointed out, internationalization can be somewhat tricky on alternative keyboard layouts. As it is, I find that languages with extra letters often move some extra symbols (like {[]}) into combinations with peripheral keys, thus making coding a chore as compared to on US keyboards. What I would like to see is if anybody has a good way of getting rid of both the "key" and "board" part of keyboards. Electronics and manufacturing is so cheap today that this could be feasible to produce on a large scale. For those who have a sense of rhythm, I'm thinking a combination of twisting/pushing/tapping/whatever moves that in combination would indicate a given symbol. This would take some focused effort to learn, but after that... The form factor could be a ball, a pair of gloves, a combination with pedals, a guitar-like thing, whatever. Keyboards would make a cheap fallback in settings where such a contraption would be inappropriate. Has anyone else thought of something similar?