The permissions of "Kindle" could not be determined

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Borland Turbo Pascal vs Modula-2 vs Ada

Boring ordinary keyboards like normal humans use versus expensive ergonomic versus build-your-own; flat versus contoured... (see geekhack.org for just how intense this can get).

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by NullNix

Boring ordinary keyboards like normal humans use versus expensive ergonomic versus build-your-own; flat versus contoured... (see geekhack.org for just how intense this can get).

Ah yes, remember the chord input thing for one hand? Like a one handed stenographer. I think called Microwriter and late 1970s. A Stenographer's keyboard uses two hands and chords (multiple simultaneous keys) and though the fastest system, like shorthand for script, it's never going to be mainstream due to learning time & effort.

QWERTY since 1873 (and language variations), but Dvorak and Colemak don't seem to have enough advantages. UNIX/Linux/Solaris/BSD with AltGr and Compose Key using a UK PC Keyboard allows the most languages most easily, though the .XCompose file needs edited to add Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic letters etc if Latin/Roman (includes Polish, Celtic, Icelandic, Spanish, German, French etc) is your main text.
I also added Compose 0 ' and Compose 0 " for ′ and ″ (prime and double prime for feet, inches, seconds, minutes) Compose g letter is Greek lower case and Compose G LETTER is Greek upper case.
Compose and AltGer on Linux are unaffected by choice of Keyboard Layout (AZERTY, QWERTY, Colemak, Dvorak).

The USA PC Keyboard is missing a key.

[Aleron Ives]

When it comes to the old vi vs emacs debate, I take door #3 and use ne.

[NullNix]

(Aside: this is obviously deeply relevant to Kindle discussions, given that the last Kindle to have an actual keyboard stopped being made over a decade ago, and that keyboard was terrible!)

Originally Posted by Quoth

Ah yes, remember the chord input thing for one hand? Like a one handed stenographer. I think called Microwriter and late 1970s.

Yep! There are new variants of this now, including two-handed cordless versions that you can literally use with your hands by your sides in natural resting posture. As a severe RSI sufferer I've been tempted by that, but it took me twenty years to learn to type properly on QWERTY so that felt like a jump too far. For the last two decades it's been Maltron all the way for me, but the bugginess of its closed-source firmware (the keyboard needs rebooting with a button on the bottom every hour or so as it starts to lose keystrokes) and the fear of depending utterly on one tiny company all of whose employees appear to be over 60 years old has got me ordering a Glove80, which should be *interesting* to try out

Originally Posted by Quoth

A Stenographer's keyboard uses two hands and chords (multiple simultaneous keys) and though the fastest system, like shorthand for script, it's never going to be mainstream due to learning time & effort.

I encountered a pop-up bookstall at the south edge of London last year in which one of the items on sale (for about £2) was a Bible in Pitman shorthand. I didn't buy it because, well, I can't read Pitman shorthand... but it was a nice curiosity. (I did buy a copy of Pinker's _Words and Rules_ for £3, a nice tenfold reduction on its normal sale price).

Originally Posted by Quoth

QWERTY since 1873 (and language variations), but Dvorak and Colemak don't seem to have enough advantages.

It's questionable whether Dvorak has any at all. At least Maltron's layout is the result of a a fairly systematic search for language-specific local layout optima (and the Glove80 is the result of a wonderfully crazy repeated physical trial process with a test rig that let them test thousands of keyboard layout variations without having to build thousands of different keyboards). Dvorak's? Nobody really knows how he came up with it except that his stated method was probably not what he actually did, and all the tests of it that he didn't personally run came out saying it was not really significantly superior to QWERTY.

Originally Posted by Quoth

UNIX/Linux/Solaris/BSD with AltGr and Compose Key using a UK PC Keyboard allows the most languages most easily, though the .XCompose file needs edited to add Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic letters etc if Latin/Roman (includes Polish, Celtic, Icelandic, Spanish, German, French etc) is your main text.

The recommended modern approach is XKb. A shame XKb is basically totally undocumented outside Peter Hutterer's blog. How exactly the xkb hackers thought their xmodmap replacement would turn into a good customization method back in the 90s, when there was no documentation whatsoever for people to learn how to use it to do anything at all, is an abiding mystery to me.

Originally Posted by Quoth

The USA PC Keyboard is missing a key.

Hell yes. Also \ should be on an unshifted base-layer key. So should _ and - and / and all four varieties of bracket. (I'm not aware of any keyboard layout that satisfies this, and almost all of them have the most desirable brackets, the normal rounded ones, on shifted keys!)

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by NullNix

It's questionable whether Dvorak has any at all. At least Maltron's layout is the result of a a fairly systematic search for language-specific local layout optima (and the Glove80 is the result of a wonderfully crazy repeated physical trial process with a test rig that let them test thousands of keyboard layout variations without having to build thousands of different keyboards). Dvorak's? Nobody really knows how he came up with it except that his stated method was probably not what he actually did, and all the tests of it that he didn't personally run came out saying it was not really significantly superior to QWERTY.

I find that statement about tests not run by Dvorak not showing a significant superiority to QWERTY a bit hard to believe since back in the bad old days when they did speed typing competitions on IBM Selectrics, the winners rather overwhelmingly used Dvorak keyboard layouts.

On June 21, 1940, Velma Crismon (b. circa 1924), a student at Lincoln High School in Tacoma, types 113 words per minute at the International Typewriting Contest in Chicago, setting a new world record for high school students. She uses an early IBM electric typewriter with a keyboard patented by August Dvorak (1894-1975).

During the period between 1933, when Dvorak and his disciples began teaching the system in the Pacific Northwest, and 1946, when the official contests ended, converts to the Dvorak keyboard set 26 international records.

World's fastest typist – English language
As of 2005, that prestigious title belongs to a woman called Barbara Blackburn who managed to not only hit a peak of 216 wpm on a Dvorak keyboard, i.e., a keyboard designed to reduce finger motion, her average typing speed also varied between 150-170 wpm.

One of the reasons that I've read that the Dvorak keyboard layout did not replace the QWERTY keyboard was simply that QWERTY was well known and free while Dvorak wanted royalties on using his keyboard layout.

An historical oddity is that one of the design goals of the QWERTY keyboard was a deliberate attempt to slow down typists to prevent the type bars from tangling.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

An historical oddity is that one of the design goals of the QWERTY keyboard was a deliberate attempt to slow down typists to prevent the type bars from tangling.

That is frequently claimed, but some say it's untrue.

I've built custom keyboard hardware (miniature keyboards) using Tact switches wired to the chip/IC out of a PS/2 or USB keyboard. It's quite easy to trace the rows and columns.
MS had a Keyboard layout editor that created a driver. Seems to fail on install on Win7 & win10, though they still linked to their installer last time I looked.

One idea I had was four light pipes, each illuminating one corner of every key. Drive the LEDs with interface IC Numlock & Scroll-lock and repurpose those status (Sent from host to keyboard on all XT, AT, PS/2 and USB PC compatible keyboards at least, not set by keyboard) for 1 of 4 states: base, shifted, AltGr and AltGr shifted. Thus 192 easy to see characters.
If you added Caps Lock LED too and had a 1 of 8 decoder and fancier light pipes then each printable key could show 8 letters per key cap at normal size giving 384 characters. The simple solution used a clear symbol in each corner.

I have a suspicion that current keyboards use the same IC for UK & USA (one key less) and probably anything with similar layout but the extra button left of the Z (missing on USA) is simply not wired as swapping UK-USA layouts in software OS works as if there is simply a missing key on USA keyboard.

Caps Lock was shift lock on mechanical typewriters because the carriage was lifted for caps and punctuation. Shift was too painful for more than one or two letters.

So Caps Lock is a good choice for compose. Similarly the only value of Tab (and inverse Tab) is to navigate form fields. Physical typewriters used mechanical tab stops for tables. Tabs should never be used in Wordprocessing, set a paragraph style. Some say not in programming either.

Anyone use Scroll Lock, Sys Rq, Pause or Break since the days of console/Terminal / DOS / CPM etc computing?

Anyone else find the Insert Key and Num Lock keys pointless?

I do like a desktop keyboard without the numeric pad to allow mouse closer to keyboard, but I accept some people love the numeric pad. I also find Multimedia extra keys pointless, though in Linux you can easily map them. I like a basic keyboard. My Mitsumi ones from 1990s are nice though they used a full size DIN (AT plug) to miniDIN (PS/2) adaptor and laptop needs a PS/2 to USB adaptor.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

When it comes to the old vi vs emacs debate, I take door #3 and use ne.

I use JOE (Joe's Own Editor), the Jstar variation. I also use Emacs, but only as a "base" for Fountain-Mode — so, in a sense, I don't really use Emacs. Emacs is kind of a world of its own and I'm too old to go down that rabbit hole.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I find that statement about tests not run by Dvorak not showing a significant superiority to QWERTY a bit hard to believe since back in the bad old days when they did speed typing competitions on IBM Selectrics, the winners rather overwhelmingly used Dvorak keyboard layouts.

My father swears by Dvorak, he's been using it for 25 to 30 years. He used to constantly try to get me to use it but my fingers were hard wired for QWERTY. I can see the advantage, the keys you use the most are under your fingers in the "home" row. If QWERTY wasn't designed to keep keys from "tangling" then I'm not quite sure why it was designed the way it was.

[Quoth]

I played with emacs recently to run the Eliza chat bot, which mysteriously is built in, at least on the standard version for Linux Mint. The more recent ALICE (1990s) and Mitsuku today ( https://botpenguin.com/meet-mitsuku-...irtual-friend/ )* and others only seem to vary in size of rule base and database.
I don't believe the Turing Test is a believable test of AI, nor do I think it was ever meant to be, but the more the idea that humans can be easily fooled by a parlour trick.

(* or maybe http://www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/home.htm )

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by rcentros

If QWERTY wasn't designed to keep keys from "tangling" then I'm not quite sure why it was designed the way it was.

I agree.

But sometimes – and in my own experience doing electronics, woodwork, IT, programming and writing – there isn't a lot of design or planning. "!t would be nice to have this working before <insert arbitrary deadline>."

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by rcentros

My father swears by Dvorak, he's been using it for 25 to 30 years. He used to constantly try to get me to use it but my fingers were hard wired for QWERTY. I can see the advantage, the keys you use the most are under your fingers in the "home" row. If QWERTY wasn't designed to keep keys from "tangling" then I'm not quite sure why it was designed the way it was.

It was definitely designed to encourage use of fingers on hands alternately (precisely to keep the hammers from colliding): but this is not to its detriment because this sort of alternation is desirable for speed. (Many other properties of QWERTY are, of course, to its detriment. Not that what we use nowadays is much like the original QWERTY -- I mean it's relatively recent that the keyboard gained unimportant things like the digits 0 and 1, but if you tell that to people under the age of 70 now who aren't technology archaeologist enthusiasts they look at you like you've gone mad.)