geekhack Community > Ergonomics

Dvorak to qwerty adapter (any interest?)

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MsKeyboard:
This is NOT a sales pitch, just showing the options that already exist........Later

http://www.fentek-ind.com/kbdvorak2ub.htm

Rajagra:
You probably looked at the QIDO. There's a DIY version here.

quadibloc:

--- Quote from: Harry_Y;194100 ---I've been playing with Dvorak and was thinking about how it is fine once the OS loads but until the n the computer is pretty much in QWERTY mode.
--- End quote ---
That's an interesting thought. But aside from the fact that mapping to Dvorak in the OS is likely to be good enough for most of the people who use Dvorak, there is the additional problem that converting QWERTY to Dvorak doesn't convert QWERTZ to Dvorak, or AZERTY to Dvorak.

In fact, you've just pointed out a serious design flaw in the PC platform. In order for German and French and other keyboards to work as people would expect, instead of sending scan codes, keyboards should be sending ASCII to the computer, with the keyboard arrangement hardcoded inside the keyboard itself.

However, the technology to do that, and yet also allow switching keyboard layouts, wasn't there at a reasonable price back in 1981. In fact, Unicode wasn't there in 1981, for that matter.

DreymaR:
I'd love to have a Colemak one, but the QIDO (or QICO as it would've been called) is too expensive I think.

Quadibloc: No idea what you're talking about. Keyboards shouldn't send ASCII to computers that I know of. The hardware scan codes are translated into virtual scan codes afaik, which may additionally be remapped (but it's not very common) to other virtual SCs. These are then transcribed to virtual key codes and both SC and VK are sent to the input queue as a KEY_ event. It's then up to the active processes to generate characters IF that's appropriate. That's what I think happens at least. If you were to send an ASCII code you'd send a character and not a key press which is absurd.

Working with both SC and VK seems like a bit of a stretch since their roles can often be confused. But I guess it has its uses.

Harry_Y:

--- Quote from: MsKeyboard;194123 ---This is NOT a sales pitch, just showing the options that already exist........Later

http://www.fentek-ind.com/kbdvorak2ub.htm
--- End quote ---


I like it !

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