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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

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.
- zokier 14y ago
  For programming you should consider that programming languages most likely have evolved to use the particular symbols that are easily available on US keyboard layout, without as much consideration if those symbols are the logical ones to represent whatever function.
MTGandP 14y ago
You can use [my keyboard layout optimizer](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing) to create your own optimized keyboard. I provide a corpus of programming text you can use, and you can change the weightings to increase the significance of the programming text. (I don't remember if I wrote documentation explaining how to do this; if you want to do this but can't figure out how, remind me and I'll write up some documentation.)

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.

zokier 14y ago
For programming you should consider that programming languages most likely have evolved to use the particular symbols that are easily available on US keyboard layout, without as much consideration if those symbols are the logical ones to represent whatever function.

MTGandP 14y ago

You can use [my keyboard layout optimizer](https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing https://github.com/MTGandP/Typing) to create your own optimized keyboard. I provide a corpus of programming text you can use, and you can change the weightings to increase the significance of the programming text. (I don't remember if I wrote documentation explaining how to do this; if you want to do this but can't figure out how, remind me and I'll write up some documentation.)