geekhack Community > Ergonomics
taking advantage of a Japanese built-in laptop keyboard
jacobolus:
I just bought a new touchbar MacBook Pro, since the battery of my previous laptop had been broken for a while and I was getting tired of having it turn off when I accidentally knocked out the power cord. Anyway, I finally decided this time to buy the Japanese version, since it has extra keyboard buttons including a reasonably sized (still too big but not absurdly so) spacebar.
Anyway, for now I’ve just tried to imitate a US/ANSI layout,
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/e6609a563e463d3e5ae0cf65369408a8
... which works just about as well as a regular US/ANSI keyboard, but with a slightly harder to reach return and right shift, and a slightly confusingly placed backtick. (And of course a thumb backspace key.)
The obvious next thing to do is shift the right hand over one key to the right (while we’re at it, let’s swap backspace for delete and move the fn key over to the left):
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/144dbfb7d342f1be69408069d3370759
Or if we’re feeling even more ambitious:
jacobolus:
But at some point I’d like to turn it into something more comfortable. Has anyone tried extreme changes of laptop keyboard layouts? e.g. I’d like to experiment with a layout using fingers like:
http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/0f3612b80ce3aef15c5a77148a4b38d6
(lighter color indicates resting finger positions, not necessarily centered on the keys though)
Obviously this would take making a completely different special-purpose non-QWERTY letter layout, and then learning to type on it.
jacobolus:
One unusual layout I saw in a blog comment is the "snoboard":
http://brettterpstra.com/2011/08/13/keybinding-madness/
davkol:
Yeah.
Notably, the punctuation keys in the middle could be replaced by, for example, diamond-shaped arrows.
jacobolus:
Nice. Is someone using that layout? Swapping left ctrl and caps lock back is a regression from the Japanese original. I also don’t think I’d especially like the locations of -, =, or `. But the right shift and enter are pretty good in that version.
I’d just put arrows on a layer.
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