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by rhizome 2861 days ago
It would be interesting to design a keyboard whose key arrangement is weighted toward standard shortcut combinations. Maybe put them mostly on the left hand side to allow (right-handed) mousing without looking at the keyboard.
1 comments
sraquo 2861 days ago
Keyboards like Diverge and Ergodox are fully programmable so nothing's stopping you from doing that today!

Also, I found that putting a small touchpad^ in a thumb-accessible area (near where a laptop touchpad would be) is a good enough replacement for a mouse.

^ http://www.ergonomictouchpad.com/

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rhizome 2859 days ago
Well yeah, but what about the rest of the keys? It's one thing to put all the shortcut keys on the left or right side, but quite another to arrange the keys so that typing is...possible.
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sraquo 2859 days ago
You don't have to change from the qwerty layout for general typing.

For example, you can program the keyboard in such a way that pressing X+A sends Ctrl+C keys to the OS, where X is a custom modifier button (Not Ctrl but a separate button that you assign for this use case) and A is, well, whatever other button on the keyboard you want to use for this, not necessarily "C".

Or you can have a single button programmed to send Alt+Tab, or... whatever, really, the firmware is very flexible.

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rhizome 2858 days ago
pressing X+A sends Ctrl+C

Yeah, I know about remapping and that's not going to happen. What a nightmare! But the more I think about my idea the worse it sounds. What are the 12 most common shortcut keys? It's hard to narrow them down to that, and I'm not sure everybody would agree. Still, ergonomically it would be an interesting challenge.

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sraquo 2858 days ago
> What are the 12 most common shortcut keys?

FWIW the WhatPulse app can tell you that (for your own typing) e.g. https://i.imgur.com/SuPLw9h.png

I used its data to drive my custom layout decisions.

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