the kids are coming up with crazy keyboard layouts you’ve never dreamed of
180+ pages on keyboard layouts - Keyboard layouts doc - Google Docs
2 Likes
UPDATE: to my enduring shame, I still haven’t learned to type properly. Some things are just too deeply engrained.
2 Likes
I guess I mostly stick to the home row as I was taught to in keyboarding class but I think my index fingers frequently reach for keys that are supposed to be the purview of other fingers. Oh well, I type quickly enough to accomplish what I want. Perhaps I’ll never be the best at The Typing of the Dead
I will never type correctly due to my hands. My current KB is one of the 40% ortho microcenter ones and my thumbs have never gotten less use.
used to be that, i think, my right hand stated on the home keys while the left sprawled and traipsed all over the place but i haven’t had a desktop for several years now so i fear i’ve dropped the habit
2 Likes
i type extremely fucked-uppedly and i will never learn. my inconsistency is a point of pride
1 Like
If the world bans me for typing in fucked up ways I will face god and…
my typing origin story is I used to hunt and peck qwerty (probably like 20-30 wpm) but in high school I got linked from Slashdot or somewhere to dvzine.org. in peak Linux nerd fashion I thought “wow! qwerty is illogical!” and learned to touch type Dvorak cold turkey. it was a rough few months but over time I got to the point I could type ‘proper form’ without looking around 85-90 wpm
get a new keyboard last month, start looking at layouts, realize all the cool keyboard zoomers think Dvorak is an outdated meme from the 1930s. all the cool kids are using AI generated layouts from like two years ago
and, well, they go fast
so now I’m using monkey type to teach myself a new layout, it’s slow going but I cracked the 25wpm barrier after a week or two so it’s only up from here
most of the newfangled layouts have commonly used consonants on one side (srnthcdk etc) and common vowels + one consonant on the right (aei + n, d, h, etc). uncommon letters like z q x get shunted either to the pinkies or to the middle column.
they try to minimize using the same finger for consecutive letters (‘same finger bigrams’ SFBs) or using the same finger with a one character gap (‘same finger skipgrams’ SFS, aka DSFBs) or ‘redirects’ that switch directions partway thru a three letter sequence, like the word “sad” on qwerty. and minimizing overall finger distance and necessary finger speed, weighted by which fingers are the strongest vs weakest.
there’s actually a host of analyzers that people have coded to look at stuff like this, you plug in a keyboard layout and it spits out the numbers. it’s pretty cool from an applied statistics standpoint actually. like you take a keyboard layout, swap C and G and say, does that make it better or worse? and there’s some data that will actually help you know
anyways if you don’t care about any of that but do want to know what the cool kids are using, I suggest checking out Semimak JQ and Sturdy.
I even made this Sturdy mod which preserves ZXC near the left hand for shortcuts, if that’s your thing. Note: you will need a programmable keyboard e.g. QMK, I don’t have an install file for this
3 Likes
They’ll pry QWERTY from my cold dead hands
1 Like
im still thinking about this
to capitalize a single letter they hit caps lock button, type one letter, then hit it again and keep typing? madness. how do they do quotation marks and other things like that?
oh also i type basically normally (“the way you’re supposed to”) with maybe a few inconsequential divergences. i learned to type because i was taking a high school computer class at the same time AIM blew up so i had tons of “home row” practice.
1 Like
yeah caps lock for making letters big shift for things only shift works for
2 Likes
God bless Nat, but it is my firm belief that the sunk cost of using whatever layout you already know can never be outweighed by the tax of learning a new one, especially since we all have old brains and calcified neurons
3 Likes
I have seen zero evidence that there’s anything better about alt keyboard layouts over qwerty aside from maybe the idea that if you didn’t learn how to type properly on qwerty, you’re going to pick up better typing form while learning a new layout.
1 Like
i have a friend who can switch between dvorak and qwerty and prefers dvorak because it’s ‘more efficient.’ i don’t know how she got her brain there, because doing an alternate keyboard layout just seems like rearranging the alphabet for funsies to me.
i use an unusual keyboard layout on my phone and it took me about 2 weeks of practice to get right but i was so so sick of the tiny little buttons on a normal layout that it was worth it. i kinda want to do that with a physical keyboard but i’m too cheap
it looks like this btw
(the reason this is more efficient is because hexagons kick ass and the space button is in the middle and small, so it takes up far less space. basically you gain button size at the cost of a weird layout)
7 Likes
ok this looks actually pretty good
do you think it’d have been much more difficult to learn if it wasn’t based on qwerty?
wetgulp
3 Likes
I used wetgulp for a bit but they charge you if you want it to be useful
2 Likes
not really, no. it felt so foreign in my hands that i don’t think it being based on qwerty at all helped
it’s called typewise btw, and yeah they charge for it unfortunately. i think it’s like $20 a year or something.