While chatting about it on the Telegram channel, Samuelcable pointed out that it would be a matter of just throwing about needed keys, but that'd be too easy — toss a bunch of keycaps around an alphanum block, record where they fall and call it a day? No... this thing should superficially look like a normal layout, but actually be annoying to the point of near-uselessness.
I decided to design a layout with the following goals and restrictions:
- Be confined to the general shape of regular keyboards. For simplicity, a common TKL keyboard (the numpad can be studied later on).
- Be generally recognizable as a QWERTY keyboard (messing with the logical layout of the letters and symbols should be mostly a matter left to the upper level of logical and national layouts).
- Superficially look like a usable keyboard layout, but be horrendous to actually use.
Let's comment on some of its main features:
- These days, many people dislike the Ins key and question its purpose. It is therefore punished to be alone in a corner and think about it did!
- The F-keys have always been divided in three blocks. It follows, then, that they should be grouped by their divisibility by three.
- The lock keys have to stick together. They share analogous functionalities, after all.
- Experts in mathematics have determined that, mostly, 0<1 and, specially, 0<9.
- Latin Enter for a modern world. Note that an ISO version of this could be crafted as well, to appease people who are too European for their own good.
- Space is an important character, so it needs two dedicated keys instead of just one.
- Smart people correct their mistakes. We should therefore make it easy to do so, not harder, in either direction.
- When moving around, one's focus should be on the window or the screen, not just on the tiny cursor.
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
P.D.: there's the seed of an actually interesting idea that I deformed mercilessly here to make it awful. Can you spot it?