Special Characters

[Tim]

On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 22:52 -0600, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
> I've always wanted a keyboard that has the letters arranged in order.
> It makes no sense for me, and likely 95% of other computer users, to
> have querty or other unnatural key arrangements.

There are some children's keyboards that have them arranged in that
fashion.  Some don't even require special drivers, as they
electronically re-arrange the commands.  i.e. You press Q, and it sends
the code normally sent for a letter Q, irrespective of where Q was
located on the keyboard.  Unlike the usual keyboard method, where the
location of the key you pressed is sent, and the keyboard driver tells
the computer that was a letter Q.

If you take lessons, though.  The keyboard layout becomes second nature,
quite quickly.  You can do that with a program, you don't need to go to
a school.  While it may seem overkill, for many, but if you do a lot of
email, or programming, or any other regular typing.  It's worth it.  You
also avoid getting painfully cramped fingers from awkward typing habits.

Beyond the occasional muslce twitch, I can type with my eyes closed.  I
just tped this paragraph, that way.

And managed to do that with only two typos.  I might have managed it
without the errors if I was sitting comfortably.

> I realize that they are based on character frequency in English, which
> serve only stenographers who: type with all 10 fingers, instead of
> picking with 2-3 fingers, like most people do; and write in only one
> language

Well, true.  Though not for convenience, but for inconvenience's sake. 

The most used keys were pushed to the outer locations, where it's
hardest for you to type (with your little fingers, or stretching to
reach them), to deliberately slow typists down.  The idea being, that
hopefully, to type a word, you're generally using a finger from each
hand alternately.  It doesn't pan out in practice, but it's fairly
close, considering the spread of letters on the keyboard and it being
completely unknown what a typist would be typing.
> 
> Your suggestion of having extra keys for diactical and punctuation
> marks and symbols is definitely a good one. It would be difficult to
> standardize all of this to accommodate all languages, but to
> standardize it for all languages that use the Roman alphabet and
> Arabic numerals, like most European languages do, should not be that
> difficult. I wish manufacturers would put some thought into this.

Me too, and it's not even a new task.  Look up Linotype machine
keyboards (what magazines and newspapers used to be created with).  The
English Linotype keyboard was optimised for English print, and for the
operator to only need to typing using their right hand.  No doubt
foreign equivalents were invented with the same idea.

For most of the world using the Roman character set (and similar), you
probably could come up with a widely useful keyboard.  Obviously you'd
have to be more customised for some languages which use much more
characters, or use characters which are built from combination of
standard keys.

Changing the standard keyboard bites you in the bum when you have to
boot into the motherboard BIOS, which uses a different character set
than your custom one.  Or you dual boot, etc.

There are a bunch of alternative keyboards, but most never caught on
because they're too wierd, though some are quite practical.

For what it's worth, in Australia, some of the early telex machines had
alphabetical keyboards.  I'm told it was a union thing.  The technical
union didn't want to lose their jobs to the secretaries, so they
insisted on the keyboard being arranged in that fashion.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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