Seeking the most efficient layouts

[Muirium]

Glad to hear my favourite layout of them all has worked its magic on you.

As for Numpad keys: I have implemented those—albeit for a different purpose—on my own HHKB. Details over on the µHHKB thread. Is a staggered numpad, hidden behind the alphas, as good as a traditional, linear, dedicated hardware numpad? No, but it comes for free, takes up no space at all, you'll never bash your mouse into it, and I use mine quite a bit.

Spoiler:

What the Deuce is all that?

Fascinating! And yeah, at first I'm not gonna lie I never liked the idea of losing keys, but I feel like using a Model F XT for so long opened me to the idea a bit more. Getting another HHKB cemented that, the switches are so good lubricated and silenced like this so I had to give it a good shot, and it was portable and I could use it at work! And losing almost no functionality from a Tenkeyless, with these switches and this space? On top of the fact that I found I was MORE efficient with those keys? It's been a game changer!

And I'll have to try these layouts, I feel like not having legends for them at first will make it more difficult, but certainly worth the time investment.

Take baby steps. My Karabiner creations have been developing for two years already, and I certainly didn’t drop the whole lot of them on my HHKB at once. Indeed, a lot of things have moved around when I found my fingers jabbing at them in different places than I’d planned.

Always let your fingers tell you the truth. They’re the guys who’ll make it happen. Let them have their say.

[AndyJ]

And therein lay the problem: to learn a new alpha layout besides QWERTY, you must go through an angry world of SUCK

QWERTY might as well be random, particularly for non-English text.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

The object behind most of the alternative layouts is to minimize finger travel, with the idea that the less distance your hand has to move, the faster you can be. That's not necessarily true; it can often be faster to use a different finger entirely, or even a finger on the other hand, already pre-positioned and ready.

There are a handful of people who picked up some speed with one of the alternative layouts; for any one of those, there are hundreds (or more) that barely made it past hunt-and-peck. It's not all "because you learned QWERTY first", either; there are lots of people who learned a new layout long after learning how to type, and can switch seamlessly between English-QWERTY and French-AZERTY, etc.

[Muirium]

QWERTY and QWERTZ are barely different layouts, really, and even AZERTY wouldn't take too much adaptation; as evil as it is! I gave Colemak a try because, unlike Dvorak, it was explicitly designed with familiarity in mind. The bottom row in particular is a smart choice for all of us with Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste as deeply in our muscle memory as the alphabet. When I got the appropriate caps in Round 5 to try it on my NovaTouch, I dedicated a week with premium caps on a pretty nice keyboard to my own Colemak experiment. "Let's learn this thing!"

I still found it a devilish challenge. The intensity of my muscle memory was strong indeed. I tried keeping my fingers homed, like classically trained touch typists do, because I don't do that at all on QWERTY and maybe it would make new muscle memory, adjacent to my usual "floating hands all over the place" typing style. I found it did, maybe, a little. I certainly liked the shorter movements in so many words, and the rolls, and the really quite "umami" feeling I had when Colemak was working for me. I really wanted to make progress in committing it to muscle memory, and felt that I was, but there was a lot of wishful thinking going on, which would burst whenever I tested my typing speed. As nifty as the layout felt, I could never break 20 wpm in tests that week. 20-25% of my regular sustained typing speed! Urgh! It was really slowing me down, and I felt it whenever I found my mind running far ahead of my fingers in my work.

What a joy it was to switch back to hideously inefficient yet familiar QWERTY! Whatever its flaws, I’m so used to it I scarcely feel them. They're hidden from my fingers, only revealed when I’m trying out some other layout.

Anyway, a month on is a good time to check back in with ƛ about the progress of the experiment…

[fohat]

all of us with Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste as deeply in our muscle memory as the alphabet.

QWERTY! Whatever its flaws, I’m so used to it I scarcely feel them.

Same here. My birthday last month started with a "7" so I am pretty well cemented in the muscle memory department.

Even my seldom-used laptop (Thinkpad) keyboard is frustrating. And one particular nuisance for me is that "Function" is at the bottom left corner where I am so accustomed to finding "Control" ....

[Muirium]

I’m coming up on 16k days, myself.

Control doesn't live down there, though. It's left of A, instead of the EMERGENCY EJECT latch of unpressable disaster.

Spoiler:

You sure? Okay. Just a sec.

[phinix]

all of us with Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste as deeply in our muscle memory as the alphabet.

QWERTY! Whatever its flaws, I’m so used to it I scarcely feel them.

Same here. My birthday last month started with a "7" so I am pretty well cemented in the muscle memory department.

Even my seldom-used laptop (Thinkpad) keyboard is frustrating. And one particular nuisance for me is that "Function" is at the bottom left corner where I am so accustomed to finding "Control" ....

I had t460s in the past - don't know if all Thinkpads are like that, but you can change that key in BIOS to be CTRL.

[fohat]

I had t460s in the past - don't know if all Thinkpads are like that, but you can change that key in BIOS to be CTRL.

My laptop is a T440p but I use the Linux Mint operating system.

How would I simply swap those 2 keys?

Thanks! I haven't messed around in BIOS very much.

[phinix]

I had t460s in the past - don't know if all Thinkpads are like that, but you can change that key in BIOS to be CTRL.

My laptop is a T440p but I use the Linux Mint operating system.

How would I simply swap those 2 keys?

Thanks! I haven't messed around in BIOS very much.

https://youtu.be/f9SEV2olUwQ

[fohat]

https://youtu.be/f9SEV2olUwQ

Thank you! I had no idea that it was so common and easy.

Wish I had asked the question when I got the laptop. Fortunately I don't use it very often.

[Muirium]

This thing is going to make me scream when I have to switch come Monday.

So you tasted perfection and—two months later—there's no way back.