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What Do You Think of the COLEMAK Keyboard?
dafuchs asks: "Colemak, a new keyboard layout claims to be better then QWERTY and Dvorak. While i'm not certain if I should switch, it looks neat. It is better for hacking then Dvorak, and best of all, the 'l' is not in the right top corner. What do you think? Is it worth a try?"
In the days of AT and PS2 keyboard switching was a problem. These days you can just carry a USB DVORAK (or COLEMAK) keyboard around with you and plug it in wherever youre using it.
Are we still looking for a keyboard which is somehow quicker to type on than Qwerty? Why? What characteristics are we after, exactly? How would you measure how much better it is? Keep finding 1000 people to start from scratch with it, time them learning it, then time them using it at a reasonable level of competence? Where are you going to find people who haven't been "tainted" with Qwerty?
Give up, or at least, stop posting about it to Slashdot. Please.
And speaking as someone who does a lot of typing in my native language, I'd rather have my Ås, Äs and Ös as first-class letters, thankyouverymuch.
/. filters unicode characters
I, on the other hand, am glad, that some ppl at the beginning of the computer era in Poland decided to disregard official Polish Norms and create "Polish Programer's Keyboard" -- basically US QWERTY keyboard with all the nine Polish characters[1] accessible via Alt keys on their latin counterparts. Polish "typewriter keyboard" is QWERTZ with some "additions" which basically make it unusable for anything computer related due to all those removed special symbols, and it still lacks some Polsh characters in upper/lower case.
But still, typing "Alt+t, c" instead of "Alt+c" is plain dumb. The only good thing in this layout would be the ability to occasionally write diacritical characters from other latin-based languages w/o the necessity to switch keymaps.
Robert
[1] aogonek, cacute, eogonek, lstroke, nacute, oacute, sacute, zacute, zabovedot -- frelling
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
What a stupid reply. Thanks for taking the time to lower my IQ. Keyboard layout and programming languages. Yeah, totally the same thing. Oh wait, you must be one of the guys that's trying to sell one of these pieces of crap. My bad.
:).
If you had put in the same amount of effort to read my post as you did in crafting your oh-so-eloquent response, you'd realize that the analogy answers both of your questions. People keep coming up with new keyboard layouts for the same reason they come up with new programming languages - because it's a project they want to accomplish in an area that they find interesting (see the fellow who set up an evolutionary algorithm to determine the best layout). This also answers the second question, although that could have been answered by looking at, oh, I don't know, just about every single post on slashdot about some guy making a rocketship out of old toast or putting his G3 mac into a Commodore 64 case and the inevitable dozen "but why on earth would someone do this?" replies.
By the way, if you had RTFA, you'd realize that nobody is selling anything - it's a free software keyboard layout. Keyboard and keyboard layout. Yeah, totally the same thing. Oh wait, you must be one of those guys who is so interested in posting a reply that you think is clever that you don't bother to read either the article or the post to which you are replying. My bad.
No offense, but my posts aside, I think you're doing just fine lowering your IQ on your own
Think of it this way: Nobody else will use your computer. They'll take one look at the keyboard and decide it isn't worth the effort.
One of my friends just recently sanded all the letters/punctuation off his keyboard and airbrushed everything black.
There is 0 (Zero) chance that I will ever really try to use his computer if I'm at his place. It just isn't worth the guesswork to browse a website.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Its funny you say that as I know a lot of people who like it that way. In fact I do the
.profile (or whatever shell you use)
:( :( )
exact same thing on standard pc keyboards (swap caps lock and ctrl). The capslock is hardly ever used while ctrl is used quite a bit (think emacs) so swapping them makes it *much* easier to extensively use the ctrl key instead of stretching the pinky down.
That said, for linux and sun I think you should like into Xmodmap Not only can you software swap the ctrl and
capslock back to the pc position (or as I do swap pc keyboards to the sun position) you can remap the del key to backspace (which I agree is in the wrong place).
Actually if you aren't running X on your sun box the standard place to fix the stupid backspace issue is using stty in your
stty erase ^?
In any case that will fix your backspace issue. I'm surprised you dont like the ctrl-capslock switch as it really does make life easier..
anyway regardless of how you like it there is no need to purchase an external keyboard for unix systems (except for the mac which has some funky hardware capslock which prevents switching
-avi
This whole conversation shows the need for a new product. I don't have the background to do it, but I'll throw it out there in case anyone wants to run with it...
Just like the keyloggers that you can install on "any keyboard" why not make a very simple device that remaps the keyboard? Be it USB or PS2, just a simple in-line device. All it would need to do is capture the keys in the way you're typing in and translate them into the "normal" QWERTY layout.
Simple enough, walk around with a small device the size of some of these keyloggers are, plug it in between the keyboard and computer and you've got your layout anywhere you go. Same device, just with different programming allows for different layouts...
If someone wants to run with this, by all means go ahead, you've got my blessing.