geekhack Community > Ergonomics
taking advantage of a Japanese built-in laptop keyboard
captain:
1 and ESC wasting space. Plus no tilde to the left of 1!?! Fail
Findecanor:
--- Quote from: jacobolus on Wed, 21 June 2017, 19:00:13 ---I just bought a new touchbar MacBook Pro...
--- End quote ---
This thread is pointless; simply because because that keyboard's switches and keycaps lend themselves only to hunt-and-peck typing anyway. You are polishing a turd.
I instead propose that you would design a new external keyboard, and see if it would be possible to integrate a USB Type C hub/dongle of some kind (which are practically compulsory for contemporary MacBooks anyway) into its case for convenience. I know you have the skills to make one. Such a keyboard would also be usable when the laptop is on a desktop stand and you would not be able to reach the MacBook "keyboard" comfortably.
jacobolus:
--- Quote from: Findecanor on Fri, 23 June 2017, 07:13:47 ---This thread is pointless; simply because because that keyboard's switches and keycaps lend themselves only to hunt-and-peck typing anyway. You are polishing a turd.
--- End quote ---
This keyboard is impressively snappy considering how little height they have to work with. Overall the laptop is extremely thin and portable. I wish the key tops were slightly smaller with a bit more space in between though.
USB hubs are certainly not “practically compulsory”. I rarely need more than 2 ports, and this laptop has 4.
I don’t ever use a “desktop stand”.
jacobolus:
--- Quote from: captain on Fri, 23 June 2017, 00:32:55 ---1 and ESC wasting space. Plus no tilde to the left of 1!?! Fail
--- End quote ---
What do you mean esc wasting space? It’s part of the “touch bar”.
As for the lack of a backtick key and the unusually large 1, that is because the Japanese keyboard needs enough space on the right side to fit both the yen key and the 1u backwards delete. In order to fit in the same space Apple allots for their ANSI keyboards (which use a 1.5u delete) everything is shifted half a unit to the left, leaving no room for another key to the left of the 1. Instead of leaving a gap there they just extended the key to the edge. One thing that is nicer about this is that the home row and bottom letter row become horizontally symmetrical.
Arguably the whole general QWERTY/IBM layout is a “failure” in many ways, and ideally everyone would switch to a more rational design, but mainstream computer vendors can’t really fix that at this point.
jacobolus:
Update: I've been using an Apple Japanese laptop keyboard for 7 years now, and it continues to be great. I never quite got around to more ambitious layout ideas, but something like this is still a dramatic improvement over the ordinary US-ANSI layout for me:
I could probably figure out something better to do with the number row than duplicating two of the numbers, but this works for me.
The delete key using the right thumb continues to be excellent, and spacing the hands 2 keys further apart is a huge ergonomic advantage, with significantly less wrist strain.
One silly thing is that Apple decided to move the whole number row .25u to the left on their recent Japanese laptop keyboards, I guess to make the 1u delete key 1.25u instead. So now the number row doesn't quite line up with other keyboards, which is slightly annoying if you need to switch back and forth to a standard keyboard. They also, for better or worse, bailed on the touch bar, so now there is a full row of F keys for people who want extra keys up top.
One final silly thing: Mac OS now uses the name "U.S." to mean "the Latin letters printed on the physical Japanese keyboard", whereas it used to mean "more or less approximate US-ANSI layout". So now if you want US-ANSI layout you need to pick "Australian" as the input source. The standard Japanese Latin layout is in my opinion quite horrible for anyone used to a US-ANSI keyboard (e.g. the apostrophe on shifted 7 is ridiculous), so this naming scheme is mystifying.
For reference, the standard "U.S." (i.e. Japanese Latin) layout is like this:
The "Australian" layout (on Japanese physical keyboard) is like this:
And the physical US-ANSI Apple laptop keyboard is like this:
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