What layout do you use?

[fohat]

ANSI of course.

workshop-f7/ibm-model-f-122-key-termina ... rry%20ansi

But in that scenario I probably waste nearly half a dozen slots that could be assigned to something else.

[Rimrul]

Code: Select all

Since I'm from Europe I do own a couple of ISO boards, but I prefer the ANSI enter by far. ISO is just a waste of space[...]

See, I've seen that argument a couple of times, but to me it's the exact opposite way around. The way I see it, ANSI has 101 keys, while ISO has 102 in the same space. So to me that says ISO gets more keys out of the same space than ANSI does.

That said, I'm a shit typist, and can't even touch type :p .

The size and type of the enter has nothing to do with the number of keys, though. The "extra" key in ISO is gained by shortening the ANSI left shift by 1 unit. So in ANSI you could easily just have a shorter left shift and still have as many keys as ISO, it just doesn't make sense for English-speaking Americans (at least, that's what they must've thought when designing the layout).

That's true, but by that logic the ISO and ANSI enters are equivalent in how many keys they take up. A Bigass enter is ANSI + \| or ISO + #~.

Well, an ISO enter is ANSI (2.25u) - #~ (1u) + \| (1.5u). So the ISO enter is 0.5u biger than the ANSI enter.

And if that's what the original "waste of space" was about I have to claim it's the other way around. why waste valuable space on the \| key that would work just as well as a 1u key? Ok, yes, ANSI enter with a 0.5u extension upwards and a 1u \| key would look hillarious and have no real advantage.

[SoerenTheElk]

Hello,

my ErgoDox will be arriving soon and I decided to use the opportunity and switch to a more ergonomic keyboard layout.
But for me it is kinda hard to get through the forest of different layouts and this seems a good place to ask for help.

I'm a student (computer science) from Germany that works part time as a developer (java, python) and will continue so.
So I use a lot of different script languages and LaTEX, emacs in evilmode and VIM keybindings wherever I can. Also Linux and awesome wm (tiling window manager).

All in all, a lot of keybindings. I know I have to rebind a lot of them to buttons on the main row, but that's okay for me.
I would just prefer to do it all at once, since I have a few weeks of spare time coming and that would be the perfect opportunity.

So far I have:
- Colmak
- Dvorak
- Neo
- AdNW (looks promising, but I cant find anything for special characters like []{};/\, etc)
- Norman (good marketing, haven't heard much about it, but looks good)

So, I'm up for any advices!

Thanks for reading!

[Chyros]

And if that's what the original "waste of space" was about I have to claim it's the other way around. why waste valuable space on the \| key that would work just as well as a 1u key? Ok, yes, ANSI enter with a 0.5u extension upwards and a 1u \| key would look hillarious and have no real advantage.

You're saying pretty much exactly the same thing as I am . We're just coming to different conclusions. I'd rather stick the spare 0.5 u on a useful key like enter than on a fairly useless one like /|.

[shreebles]

The iso button right of lshift is awesome as layer1 imo

Good idea, I need to try that. Currenty my pinky has to reach up to Caps for fn1.
>< | is a very underused key anyway given its prominent position. Where do you map that key then?

[bocahgundul]

60% all the time with HHKB layout like split backspace and split right shift and Caps Lock as Control and using the normal QWERTY layout, Tried Colemak and Dvorak.

Colemak is perfect for me but its really hard to get used to other people's boards so I stick to qwerty, While DVORAK is torturing my right pinky so I stopped using it

And CTRL as SHIFT is soooo gooooood.

(for people that is confused this is the video : [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNTocnb0kKk[/youtube]

[shreebles]

Shift in the bottom row???

That reminds me of a funny image someone posted on an asian (I think) keyboard forum.
He used a OG Cherry set and filled the whole bottom row with 1.25u ISO shift keys as a moogle kit
Can't find it right now.

[shreebles]

The iso button right of lshift is awesome as layer1 imo

Good idea, I need to try that. Currenty my pinky has to reach up to Caps for fn1.
>< | is a very underused key anyway given its prominent position. Where do you map that key then?

Hm, just tried it and don't like it overall.
It's a very good idea but with my 60% centered in front of me I find it promotes an unhealthy angle of the left wrist. It forces me to twist the wrist in and fingers out to the left. Left wrist is where my injury is so I'm super sensitive about that, but YMMV.
When aiming for 0° degree angle of the wrist both horizontally and vertically my hand prefers Caps+WASD. Elbows in the air, forearms on the table.

[Samraku]

Hello,

my ErgoDox will be arriving soon and I decided to use the opportunity and switch to a more ergonomic keyboard layout.
But for me it is kinda hard to get through the forest of different layouts and this seems a good place to ask for help.

I'm a student (computer science) from Germany that works part time as a developer (java, python) and will continue so.
So I use a lot of different script languages and LaTEX, emacs in evilmode and VIM keybindings wherever I can. Also Linux and awesome wm (tiling window manager).

All in all, a lot of keybindings. I know I have to rebind a lot of them to buttons on the main row, but that's okay for me.
I would just prefer to do it all at once, since I have a few weeks of spare time coming and that would be the perfect opportunity.

So far I have:
- Colmak
- Dvorak
- Neo
- AdNW (looks promising, but I cant find anything for special characters like []{};/\, etc)
- Norman (good marketing, haven't heard much about it, but looks good)

So, I'm up for any advices! :-)

Thanks for reading!

I'm in the same boat you are, planning to switch from Qwerty when the Keyboardio ships. Have you checked out Arensito or Programmer's Dvorak? I'm planning to take the punctuation and number bar from Programmer's Dvorak and combine it with the alphabetical layout of Arensito. But I only speak English. I assume from your listing of Neo and AdNW that you also speak German? You could try learning two layouts: an English one and a German one. You would probably want to keep all the punctuation and numbers the same between them, though. :D

[bocahgundul]

Shift in the bottom row???

That reminds me of a funny image someone posted on an asian (I think) keyboard forum.
He used a OG Cherry set and filled the whole bottom row with 1.25u ISO shift keys as a moogle kit
Can't find it right now.

Yeah, did you see the vids that I linked?

[shreebles]

Yeah I did. There was a piece where some programmer advocated against swapping Caps and CTRL, he argued that it's more ergonomic to hit CTRL with your palm. You do the same with Shift, not a bad idea honestly but I just can't get used to it

Edit: Ah found it: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/swap_CapsLock_Ctrl.html

It was Xah Lee, probably most known around here for his article "The Idiocy of Happy Hacking Keyboard"

[Rimrul]

And if that's what the original "waste of space" was about I have to claim it's the other way around. why waste valuable space on the \| key that would work just as well as a 1u key? Ok, yes, ANSI enter with a 0.5u extension upwards and a 1u \| key would look hillarious and have no real advantage.

You're saying pretty much exactly the same thing as I am . We're just coming to different conclusions. I'd rather stick the spare 0.5 u on a useful key like enter than on a fairly useless one like /|.

Yeah, the clonclusion where to put those 0.5u is identical. I just didn't quite agree with your original "both enter keys are the same size" conclusion.

whole bottom row with 1.25u ISO shift keys as a moogle kit

Why do you have to make me laugh like this?

I forgot to mention I'm currently using ISO DE but am considering other layouts:

• Neo
  • maybe with some modification to output some things in a more practical fashion (i.e. &nbsp; instead of an actual non-breaking space)
• german Dvorak type II
  • maybe mixed with programmers dvorak
• US international on ISO hardware
• Norman
  • english only, AFAIK
• Colemak
  • english only, AFAIK
• AdNW
  • Seems like too much of a mess of inofficial variations with no clear info about special characters

[bocahgundul]

Yeah I did. There was a piece where some programmer advocated against swapping Caps and CTRL, he argued that it's more ergonomic to hit CTRL with your palm. You do the same with Shift, not a bad idea honestly but I just can't get used to it

Edit: Ah found it: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/swap_CapsLock_Ctrl.html

It was Xah Lee, probably most known around here for his article "The Idiocy of Happy Hacking Keyboard"

Ah I see, well I can say that he's quite right need to reconsider swapping caps lock to control now

[davkol]

• AdNW

Seems like too much of a mess of inofficial variations with no clear info about special characters

That's one of the most nonsensical reasons to scratch a layout. Special-symbol arrangement has little/nothing to do with letter arrangement.

I can see the argument being made against "Programmer Dvorak" in the context of standard Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, because DSK is a standard de iure (ANSI), thus it's included in default installs of many systems, but that's about it.

There's nothing stopping you from using custom/Neo's/DreymaR's/… layers or extra-symbol arrangements with AdnW or practically any other letter arrangement.

• Neo
  • maybe with some modification to output some things in a more practical fashion (i.e. &nbsp; instead of an actual non-breaking space)
• german Dvorak type II
  • maybe mixed with programmers dvorak
• US international on ISO hardware
• Norman
  • english only, AFAIK
• Colemak
  • english only, AFAIK

English only is nonsense again. The fact, that a layout was designed based on analysis of a certain corpus, says nothing about actual usability on other corpora.

That being said, Colemak does allegedly suffer from poor balance on some Germanic corpora (right index finger overload IIRC), while AdnW is probably the best-optimized option currently.

[SoerenTheElk]

• AdNW

Seems like too much of a mess of inofficial variations with no clear info about special characters

That's one of the most nonsensical reasons to scratch a layout. Special-symbol arrangement has little/nothing to do with letter arrangement.

I can see the argument being made against "Programmer Dvorak" in the context of standard Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, because DSK is a standard de iure (ANSI), thus it's included in default installs of many systems, but that's about it.

There's nothing stopping you from using custom/Neo's/DreymaR's/… layers or extra-symbol arrangements with AdnW or practically any other letter arrangement.

• Neo
  • maybe with some modification to output some things in a more practical fashion (i.e. &nbsp; instead of an actual non-breaking space)
• german Dvorak type II
  • maybe mixed with programmers dvorak
• US international on ISO hardware
• Norman
  • english only, AFAIK
• Colemak
  • english only, AFAIK

English only is nonsense again. The fact, that a layout was designed based on analysis of a certain corpus, says nothing about actual usability on other corpora.

That being said, Colemak does allegedly suffer from poor balance on some Germanic corpora (right index finger overload IIRC), while AdnW is probably the best-optimized option currently.

Thanks for the comprehensiv writing. Would you suggest AdNW + a self defined layout for Special Symbols for someone that writes german and english on a 50/50 base distribution?

[davkol]

I guess so.

As a rule of thumb, I recommend (for typing in English)

• QWERTY, if you don't type much, but use hotkeys a lot;
• DSK, if you want to learn to type properly from scratch, type prose and/or want something widely supported;
• Colemak, if you need to make use of Tarmak to transition more or less fluently from QWERTY into a more efficient layout, or if you use mostly flat short-throw keyboards (e.g., laptops);
• a (custom) AdnW-/MTGAP-like layout (one of the two based on preferred typing motions/rhythm), if you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole;
• Maltron (THOR), if you have the hardware for it.

DSK and layouts inspired by that try to achieve maximal hand alternation. OTOH, Colemak, Maltron and MTGAP favor sequences of keystrokes with adjacent fingers. The latter are generally newer (thus often better optimized for their respective criteria) and supposedly more natural on computer keyboards, esp. short-throw ones. However, it's easier to disturb their balance, when significantly changing corpora, although typical typing motions/rhythm are maintained; therefore, I recommend DSK-based layouts, such as AdnW, for other languages, partly also because it's easier to use accents without breaking the rhythm.

[Rimrul]

• AdNW

Seems like too much of a mess of inofficial variations with no clear info about special characters

That's one of the most nonsensical reasons to scratch a layout. Special-symbol arrangement has little/nothing to do with letter arrangement.
[...]

There's nothing stopping you from using custom/Neo's/DreymaR's/… layers or extra-symbol arrangements with AdnW or practically any other letter arrangement.

Of course that's a reason. Yeah, i could go ahead and figure out what extra-symbol arrangements work with this from scratch, but that's not much better than figguring a whole new layout out from scratch. I'd prefer having a given full layout and decide wether it works for me, needs slight adjustments or doesn't work for me at all.

[...]

• Norman
  • english only, AFAIK
• Colemak
  • english only, AFAIK

English only is nonsense again. The fact, that a layout was designed based on analysis of a certain corpus, says nothing about actual usability on other corpora.

That being said, Colemak does allegedly suffer from poor balance on some Germanic corpora (right index finger overload IIRC), while AdnW is probably the best-optimized option currently.

Of course you can sometimes use a tool that wasn't developeded with your intentions in mind, but a hammer is usually better suited than a nail to hammer a nail. This doesn't mean that just because someone on the internet claims "X is great to do Y" it's magically true, but it might be worth giving it a try. And again I don't feel like figuring out the optimal positions for Umlauts and stuff and the rearangements needed to be optimized for german or german and english.

Yes, the end result of really figuring out all key positions for myself and my character and word usage would probably be really heaviliy optimized for me, but I'd probably go mad on the way there.

[Chyros]

And if that's what the original "waste of space" was about I have to claim it's the other way around. why waste valuable space on the \| key that would work just as well as a 1u key? Ok, yes, ANSI enter with a 0.5u extension upwards and a 1u \| key would look hillarious and have no real advantage.

You're saying pretty much exactly the same thing as I am . We're just coming to different conclusions. I'd rather stick the spare 0.5 u on a useful key like enter than on a fairly useless one like /|.

Yeah, the clonclusion where to put those 0.5u is identical. I just didn't quite agree with your original "both enter keys are the same size" conclusion.

I never said they are, I think you might've misread it :p . What I said was that ANSI + |\ is the same size as ISO + #~ — both are the size of a bigass enter, and both yield two keys in total. The question is how you divide this space between the two. In that regard, I find the ANSI layout wasteful, as a relatively irrelevant key is made larger at the cost of a more commonly used, useful key like enter.

[Rimrul]

That's true, but by that logic the ISO and ANSI enters are equivalent in how many keys they take up.

[davkol]

You apparently didn't read my post past the first couple of sentences.

Again, letter arrangement is separate from special-symbol arrangement, mostly because they're relevant on completely different, unrelated corpora. As I've mentioned, you can take the special-symbol arrangement from Programmer's Dvorak, DreymaR's Big Bag of Tricks (for Colemak), Neo, Algernon's ErgoDox layout,…

A part of making an informed decision is knowing the criteria used to design a layout. That's true for all kinds of arrangements, be it letters, special symbols or numbers. Different types of text use different vocabulary and grammar; different programming languages use different special symbols; even digit distributions vary between, say, common usage and credit-card information or addresses. A TeX typesetter demands something else then a Lisp hacker, that for a change wants something very different from a Java coder.

[Chyros]

That's true, but by that logic the ISO and ANSI enters are equivalent in how many keys they take up.

KEYS, not SPACE. They both take up one out of two keys of the BAE footprint.

[davkol]

ad ISO/ANSI: JIS is better than either. ^_~ My only problem with the vertical Enter is that it's a bit trickier to stabilize it properly.

[zslane]

In nearly 40 years of typing and coding, I can't think of a time when I wished I had something other than a standard QWERTY keyboard. The most efficient layout is the one your muscle memory is already tied to.

[Samraku]

The best argument I've heard for other layouts is not speed (learn steno if that's what you want), but ergonomics (steno is also better here, but by a smaller margin).

[zslane]

To be honest I've never really connected with the ergonomics argument. How are improved ergonomics supposed to help me, if not to type faster (a performance enhancement I don't really need anyway)? I don't suffer from RSI, nor is there anything "uncomfortable" about a standard ANSI/ISO keyboard to me. Nor I suspect to 99% of the QWERTY-using world.

I think alternate layouts are solving a problem virtually nobody (from a sheer numbers/statistics perspective) actually has. Which is why I am somewhat bemused by the rather authoritative tone of such pronouncements.

[OleVoip]

In nearly 40 years of typing and coding, I can't think of a time when I wished I had something other than a standard QWERTY keyboard. The most efficient layout is the one your muscle memory is already tied to.

I also prefer the layout I started with 36 years ago: ISO international bit-paired - at that time standard throughout Europe for all applications that did not need national special characters. I'm fluent in touch-typing with this layout as well as US and German national layouts, but ISO bit-paired is the one that feels best.

[shreebles]

OleVoip, how do you apply this layout in the real world?

From what I have read, your layout would be a QWERTY ISO layout but with a bit-paired number row of symbols, more similar to ISO-DE symbols?
That is, !,",#,$ and so forth, and ( ) on 8 and 9?

[OleVoip]

The top row is similar to ISO-DE, the bottom row more like US.

Standard ISO 2530:1975, international layout (some details are optional)

fig5.gif (37.03 KiB) Viewed 5354 times

[shreebles]

Ah, I see.
I used to type ISO-DE with swapped Y and Z to make switching between ISO and ANSI easier.

[Rimrul]

That's true, but by that logic the ISO and ANSI enters are equivalent in how many keys they take up.

KEYS, not SPACE. They both take up one out of two keys of the BAE footprint.

By that counting BAE also counts as one. The same as a 10u spacebar would.

You apparently didn't read my post past the first couple of sentences.

Sorry to disappoint you here, I read it, I just had a different opinion in some points.

Again, letter arrangement is separate from special-symbol arrangement, mostly because they're relevant on completely different, unrelated corpora. As I've mentioned, you can take the special-symbol arrangement from Programmer's Dvorak, DreymaR's Big Bag of Tricks (for Colemak), Neo, Algernon's ErgoDox layout,…

Right, but all of them (except Neo if you don't count moving the characters on Layer 2 where '.' and ',' are on Layer 1) would need some adopting to AdNW because it covers some of the keys used for their special symbols with it's core layout. And that's adopting that special symbol placement before I could even try it. This just feels like a bodge on a bodge on an experimental layout to me.
The ergodox layout looks interesting, but wouldn't work out on my non-ergodox keyboard.

A part of making an informed decision is knowing the criteria used to design a layout. That's true for all kinds of arrangements, be it letters, special symbols or numbers.

Yes. And I feel like the same set of criteria should have been applied to all of the 60% block. I think we can all agree, that even rarely used letters shouldn't end up in the navigation cluster, though.

Different types of text use different vocabulary and grammar; different programming languages use different special symbols; even digit distributions vary between, say, common usage and credit-card information or addresses. A TeX typesetter demands something else then a Lisp hacker, that for a change wants something very different from a Java coder.

Yeah, completely agree with that.

To be honest I've never really connected with the ergonomics argument. How are improved ergonomics supposed to help me, if not to type faster (a performance enhancement I don't really need anyway)? I don't suffer from RSI, nor is there anything "uncomfortable" about a standard ANSI/ISO keyboard to me. Nor I suspect to 99% of the QWERTY-using world.

I think alternate layouts are solving a problem virtually nobody (from a sheer numbers/statistics perspective) actually has. Which is why I am somewhat bemused by the rather authoritative tone of such pronouncements.

I'm not that much interested in alternmative layouts for a meassurable performance increase or ergonomics reasons, but I want to try it because I might end up enjoying it. The same thing applies to my Model M vs my G80: The Model M has probably no meassurable advantage, except for defense against burglars and to establish dominance in the office, but I enjoy typing on it.