Fun Stuff > CLIKC
Mechanical Keyboards
mtmerrick:
Touch typing is all but impossible without learning your specific keyboard. EVERY keyboard has enough differences from the next that your muscle memory and layout memorization from your keyboard aren't applicable to the next one you go to. And I was still able to pull off some pretty good typing on the TransluSense Luminae I tried at CES. Also, I haven't had to look at the keyboard on my tablet in ages.
Warning - while you were typing 3 nice long new replies have been posted. You may wish to facepalm repeatedly.
bhtooefr:
That's the trick, though, desktop keyboards tend to have standardized spacing (19 mm) of keys, making touch typing much easier even with unfamiliar keyboards. And, unless they get fancy with the layout, they tend to stick to the layout originally released on the IBM Model M 101/102-key keyboards, with slight variations (such as the Windows keys).
Laptop keyboards are a bit different, but I can usually switch between laptop keyboards, even with very different key spacing, without too many issues - it's the special functions, which do often move around (and the Fn key - I get used to the ThinkPad/Apple standard of Fn at the bottom left corner, and then switch to a Fujitsu or Dell which swaps it for left Ctrl, and wonder why things don't work) that trip me up.
ankhtahr:
Also it really helped that I switched over to a different layout. Admittedly, the one I use (“Neo”) is optimized for the German language, but it adapts very well to English as well, as English was the second language the designers had in mind. It contains the vowels and consonants you use the most on the homerow, and has the positions of all keys optimized for bigrams and trigrams. It's very nice for programmers, as it features multiple layers, the third layer e.g. contains {},(),[],<>,\,/,*?#$|~ all on very comfortable positions, and is activated by keeping the Caps-Lock key pressed. The fourth layer contains a Numberpad under the right hand and arrow keys and other navigation keys (like backspace, delete, tab, enter, page up, page down etc.) under the left hand. The fifth layer contains greek letters, and the sixth mathematical symbols. Terms like ∀x∈ℝ∃0∈ℝ:x+0=x are very easy to type. Some people may also have noticed that I sometimes use the correct quotation marks (“ and ” instead of " and "), these are also available in this layout. Well, and to me typing in different languages isn't a problem as well, as I can even type things like Sigur Rós' Icelandic titles “Dauđalogn” or “Sćglópur”. This layout is simply fantastic.
mtmerrick:
I think I have a picture of my keyboards here somewhere.....
Yup, here we go.
old pictures (the setup has changed a bit) but my laptop and the keyboard I have plugged into it haven't changed.
Yes, the laptop has a 10key pad on the side but I never use it, so I really didn't care when it got cut out of the pic.
Argh, ninja'd again. Also, I can do all that with SwiftKey, while keeping the qwertyuiop layout. :-D
bhtooefr:
Personally, I like OS X's approach of hiding useful stuff under Option, on a QWERTY layout.
(I actually tried US-International on a Windows machine for a while, and found that it had the fatal flaw of, " was mapped to umlaut first, and to get a quotation mark, you had to hit " twice!)
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