Continues from Part 8

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any progress here. Despite that, things have not been standing still. Was actually rather shocked to see that it’s co-incidentally a whole year since my last post on the topic.

Much has happened. Following on some of the feedback received, I have done the following, this list is probably not in the timeline order, or importance order:

Now I need to insert “read more” here instead of after the first point below because those WordPress people broke WordPress again.!!!!!

1. Realised that programmers also need to write documentation, or comments, and depending on what SORT of programs you are doing, it may be useful to have easy/easier access to certain mathematical (generally Greek) or financial (currency) symbols. So I added a whole bunch of those, which is probably overkill for most people, and does make the resulting layout look a bit of a dog’s breakfast.
2. I took a look at adding thumbkeys. Since E and T are the most common letters (after the space), I put those on thumbkeys. I also built a dummy layout on paper, and realised that the space bars are rather inaccessible under the palms, and so they had to move. This tied in with the new thumbkeys. Also the Alt keys had the same problem and they moved. Along the way, it became feasible/sensible to also move the enter keys. Which resulted in a rather more radical layout. However it is unlikely to stay like this, because of What Happened Next….
3.  I took another look at optimal keyboard layouts (from a logical rather than physical) point of view. This led me to dive deeply into various optimising schemes, mainly using Patrick’s Keyboard Layout Analyzer. I’ve been co-operating with Den over at Balanced Keyboard Layout and after some fiddling around managed to get high scores on Patrick’s site. However these were for standard ANSI104 or ErgoDox layouts, I’ll need to tweak them to work on my variant.
4. One of the surprising outcomes of this experiment was that it didn’t make sense to put both E and T (or even either) on the thumbkeys … .what did work was putting a single H ….
5. Added support for Dozenal (base 12)… which led to switching the numpad layout to the same as telephones, this is probably a bad idea. Also put in a NumLock key, which works on the NumRow rather than the NumPad. For those people that prefer the numbers to be unshifted.
6. The “Magic” key is now a more-standard Hyper or Meta key, with standard symbol. Likewise Esc now has Unicode symbol.

So the current in-progress version is this, but it’s going to change ….particularly the letter layouts. For some reason Firefox is making the letters italic, they’re not supposed to be.

Programmer’s KeyBoard

It looks like yesterday’s update to my DejaVu font also broke a few things, I see some squares (eg on C/X/V) that should be copy/cut/paste symbols. If/when I get that fixed I’ll replace the image.

I really wish the WordPress people would STOP BREAKING THINGS THAT WORKED.