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Comment by rudiger | Hacker News Reader

Why are the parentheses in such an awkward place (Shift+8, Shift+9, or Shift+0)? I don't program Lisp, but why don't Lisp keyboards put parentheses in a more convenient place?

Also, there are quite a few modifier keys ("Function", "Super", "Hyper", "Rub Out", etc)? Anyone know the purpose of all of them?

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Note that all of these keyboards except the Knight have a second pair of parens: the unshifted characters on the keys just right of P, where the PC/Windows layouts have square brackets. (In turn forcing square brackets into the shifted position, and curly braces onto other keys.) This helps to balance the wear on the keys. ;)

Ah, I was wondering the same thing, but I hadn't caught that those two weren't the PC brackets-and-braces keys. Thanks.

Super and Hyper are modifier keys for Emacs and to let you type things like Greek letters and math/logic symbols easily (you can see math symbols on the Space Cadet and Knight keyboards).

Rubout is just backspace. IMO having it next to the 'a' is a really good position; I rebind my Caps Lock key to Backspace on my machines. It's more convenient than the Sun-style "Control as Caps Lock" layout.

What's the hyper key? Here there are Control, Super (Windows) and Meta (Alt) but nothing like Hyper.

I can only imagine the huge powers having a hyper key would give me ;-)

You can have a Hyper key (in X11, at least!)

http://computing.fnal.gov/docs/products/xemacs/v21_1/xemacs....

Depending on your keyboard layout, the "Menu" key makes a good Hyper, and if you've set up Caps Lock as an extra Ctrl key, you can remap your left Ctrl key to something useful.

You can also separate Alt and Meta to different keys.

A quick emacs session will show you whether your new modifier keys are working as intended.

IIRC you can do similar for the (text-mode) Linux console as well.

Also works on Windows and Mac: http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_hyper_super_keys.html

> Rubout is just backspace. IMO having it next to the 'a' is a really good position; I rebind my Caps Lock key to Backspace on my machines. It's more convenient than the Sun-style "Control as Caps Lock" layout.

One of my favorite keyboards of all time had the spacebar split in two. Because I learned typing such that I always use the right thumb to press the spacebar, the left half of the spacebar made a very good backspace. I've often wished I could find more good keyboards like that.

The Kinesis Advantage is a bit like that: although they're not a usual spacebar shape, space is under the right thumb, and backspace is under the left thumb.

Almost right. Super and Hyper are pure modifiers and can be combined with any key. On the original Space Cadet keyboard, Top and Front were used to type Greek letters and symbols. (Not all of the symbols shown on the keys could actually be entered, however.) The later Symbolics keyboards had a Symbol key for this purpose.

My CS professor used to joke that they used foot pedals for open / close paren.

This is not entirely a joke for some very serious emacs users.

Jokes aside, would it not create a short pause before and after stepping on the pedal in order to synchronize with fingers typing, and thus slow you down?

I have no idea. The pedals aren't actually used for parens, they are used for Emacs keybinding prefixes.

It looks like the Racal-Norsk KPS-10 Lisp Prototype has them in a more convenient place, as well as on 9 and 0: http://webwit.nl/input/kps/1.jpg

I like that idea, even though I don't do much Lisp. Parentheses are still used everywhere in programming and are always awkward. Maybe I'll experiment with remapping some keys if I can figure out which ones to sacrifice.

I took on online file of the Dvorak keyboard layout and modded it so the parens would be where the tags in Dvorak are (shift-W and shift-E on Qwerty). I made other mods too. It's really comfy.

See http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bucky-bits.html and related.

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