Comment by sedachv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sedachv | Hacker News Reader

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The best modification that you can do to your keyboard layout is to adapt the MIT Lisp Machine keyboard layout. The changes are small but very significant, work with either QWERTY or Dvorak, and you can do them on any PC or laptop keyboard[1]:

1. Change the layout of modifier keys from Control-Windows-Alt-Spacebar-Alt-Menu-Control to Windows-Alt-Control-Spacebar-Control-Alt-Windows (bind the outermost modifier keys to Super and Hyper if you use Emacs). This will let you do keyboard chording easily with either hand and eliminate "Emacs pinky": https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/495/what-...

2. Change Caps Lock to Backspace (RUB OUT on Lisp Machine keyboards)

3. Swap parentheses () for square brackets []

[1] Not on OS X though. Apple does not provide a way to do these remappings on OS X, and breaks the keyboard internals and consequently third party tools like PCKeyboardHack/Karabiner with every OS X release. I tried early this year with Sierra and Karabiner-Elements and this did not work. Install Linux or OpenBSD.

The best improvement you can make to your mouse is adapting a 12-key thumb layout:

  F5    | Up    | F2
  Left  | Down  | Right
  Tab   | Delete| Backspace
  Enter | Space | ESC

How many times an hour do you have to reach over to the keyboard, press an arrow or Enter, then have to reach over and find your mouse again? All those seconds add up! Do your eyes leave the screen to find your mouse? This configuration lets you maintain your state of flow, because your hand almost never leaves your mouse, except for actual typing.

You'd be surpised how many tasks can be performed with just the mouse (and the left hand for CTRL+C,CTRL+V). This is the most efficient layout I've found. I've used this for about 5 years now, for massive performance gains in many administration and development roles.

Funny how a lot of people have a strong and exotic opinion about the best way to use a mouse/keyboard, but I've never seen anyone actually use a dvorak or any other exotic layout. My personal fetish is to use a standard US keyboard with a trackpoint. The only thing I hate is that I have to move my hands to get to the arrows, home, end, delete, page up and page down keys.

I for one use not just an exotic layout, but a homegrown one. My alphas match the Workman layout, and I use a 12 column, 4 row keyboard (a Planck form OLKB) so that I have plenty of thumb keys.

Symbols are kept on a separate layer of keys alongside a numpad, so that they can be grouped by how I use them. Parens, brackets, braces, are all in the two leftmost alpha columns. I keep $, @, and % in a column because I use Perl fairly often. I also keep # and ! together for fun.

Now, I'm not saying it's particularly common, but I have a friend with a similarly exotic setup and we use them on a daily basis.

Mouse chording is extremely efficient and I highly recommend it if you use a mouse. I was a big fan of combining mouse chording with structure-aware editing: https://github.com/vsedach/mouse-copy

Unfortunately this does not carry over to laptops with pointing sticks or touchpads, which is largely why I switched to a tiling UI with almost exclusive keyboard navigation. After I discontinued mouse use I stopped having wrist pain in my mouse hand, and after I started using the Lisp Machine keyboard layout I stopped having Emacs pinky, so now I no longer have any RSI symptoms from computer use. Another important consideration.

Tab, Esc, Space and F2 are all already reached easily with your left hand. Why do you like having them repeated elsewhere?

To allow better left-hand-only operation, and to avoid having to move the left hand from the "gamer claw" up to ESC and back. This is part of a larger initiative of mine - to use gaming technologies to improve business performance. In menus, the lower right button becomes a "nope" button.

But you're right about F2, and I honestly never use it. But I haven't thought of another button to replace it with - maybe Ctrl-V, and F5 with Ctrl-C? Hmm...I'll have to test this out!

too much mouse use kills my hand. i think by not reaching over from time to time you are boosting chances for RSI.

Maybe a foot pedal is what we need?

I know this is written in jest, but it kind of makes me want to buy one of those MMO mice with 12+ buttons on the side, to try it.

Any specific mouse you recommend?

I've been using a Razer Naga Epic for 5 years. I'm on my 2nd one. It works well for me, but there are a few downsides that others may not appreciate.

- Software can be required to run, needs admin to install. Sometimes the mouse can "remember" its key mappings, but often it resets to default on new PCs (1234567890-=).

- Internet sign-in required, cloud storage of mouse config is required. But there is an "offline" mode, so you could install the software to a single workstation and just save the profile locally.

- Mouse is not cheap and some people don't like the company.

Can't you rebind them through the regular keyboard preferences? Even without, _just_ binding them that way in Emacs is a huge improvement for chords.

Also, as much as I love Linux, it's not really feasible for anyone doing professional development to just up and bail on an operating system. There's IT infrastructure built around using OSX at some jobs.

> Can't you rebind them through the regular keyboard preferences?

Not for Caps Lock. I think it only lets you set it to Control.

> There's IT infrastructure built around using OSX at some jobs.

That is a really terrible idea, unless the only thing you do is develop OS X and iOS native applications. Do they really run OS X on their servers? Or is it develop-on-Mac-deploy-on-Linux? It isn't just OS X keyboard internals that are flaky and change with every release. The only reliable development environments I have seen on OS X were in fact done by "bailing on an operating system" by using virtualization.

> Not for Caps Lock. I think it only lets you set it to Control.

At least in Sierra, all 4 modifiers can be mapped to any of each other or to escape. The fn key cannot be remapped with the built in preferences.

> The fn key cannot be remapped with the built in preferences

It looks like you will be able to starting in High Sierra

That wouldn't solve the problems I was after. But you can now do that using Karabiner Elements on Sierra with the latest build.

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