Continues from Part 1

Just when you think you’re done, you’re not. The backtick/tilde key had been bothering me. I don’t use the backtick much, but I know shell programmers do, and apparently also people who work in Emacs. I do however use the tilde key a lot: when exporting from spreadsheets to .csv, I use the tilde as a separator, as it’s much easier to split something like this

“Smith, John”~26~”1 Nice Road, Cool Area, Big Town, 1234″~ “2010-02-03” by splitting on the ~ than trying to do it with this:

“Smith, John”,26,”1 Nice Road, Cool Area, Big Town, 1234″, “2010-02-03”

Also, while going over advantages and disadvantages of the layout, the lack of symmetry bothered me, as well as the backslash/pipe key looking rather lonely. I also realised that my problem with the period and the comma being next to each other was now mirrored with the semi-colon and colon next to each other. I might hit the wrong one.

Then I realised that I still had some unnecessary duplicate characters on the numeral keys: the *, ( and ). So I rearranged a few things, and got a more symmetrical layout. It also allowed me to add a Function key for those people that want to program macros etc. on the keyboard.

PKB v1.5 by Ian Douglas

The only thing still annoying me was the English words on some of the keys. So after much thought and interrogating Google and FontAwesome, I managed to replace all the text with symbols. Some are not ideal, I’ll see if better ideas or icons come along.

PKB v1.6 by Ian Douglas

Continues in Part 3