Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/24/30-keyboard-is-tiny-adorable.html
…
4 Likes
No.
I one of the things I really like about my 17" laptop is the keyboard real estate.
6 Likes
I understand why you illustrated the keyboard to have a tiny spacebar but it seems like it would make fast typing a little bit more of a hassle. Your right hand would constantly have to alternate between typing letters and spaces. Having it in the middle as a large bar makes it so you can easily hit the space with your thumb with which ever hand you’re comfortable with without having to really move.
I guess if we’re going full on weird you can forgo the space bar altogether on the keyboard itself and use a footpedal controller mapped to the space bar.
https://www.amazon.com/Fragpedal-Dual-PC-Gaming-Footpedal/dp/B005OL87NW
2 Likes
I assume this is why three-line keyboards are all gridded instead of staggered. Because you have to mess with the layout anyway to have the space bar somewhere sane, and once you’ve disrupted muscle memory you may as well start over with whatever’s most efficient.
5 Likes
I’ll be here all week.
4 Likes
The space bar could be changed to be a flipper, think of something akin to the telegraph i guess? Make it a thin, long bar that sits vertically against the bottom of the keyboard. Your hands wouldn’t have to adjust at all and you’d still be able to input spaces with your thumb, but instead of pressing down you’d be pressing against the bottom side of the keyboard.
Hope that made sense.
1 Like
includes the characters of the alphabet and four arrow keys, which are chorded in various ways to reach capital letters, numbers, function keys and so forth.
The thing that baffles me about this is this: if you’re going to have to go to the trouble of remembering many different key combinations and a radically different from the usual keyboard layout, why not also drop the querty key ordering for a more sensible one whilst you’re at it? You’ll have to learn how to use this keyboard anyway, why not go one step further?
For example:
1 Like
I schlep a ThinkPad X220 around because I like the keyboard. But I just don’t need to do substantial amounts of typing all that often.
Is this 40% 30% business a good place to be looking for an alternative? Something that would make a phone or small tablet into a reasonable typing combo?
I have a folding Bluetooth keyboard that got pretty good reviews and I found it challenging and too much of a compromise. I guess I could do more research, but maybe someone here has some ideas?
Thx in advance.
I might have expected chorded keyboards to be more common, but I suppose most people just don’t need to type quickly for extended periods anymore, and when they do need to type quickly it’s better just to forgo accuracy entirely. (I’m told they don’t even have touch-typing classes in high school anymore.)
[quote=“beschizza, post:1, topic:99699”]Here is the layout I’d like to use, which I call the “Cormac” because you don’t get to quote anyone and you sure as hell don’t get to ask questions of the place where you stand and see for a brief moment the absolute truth of the cold relentless implacable darkness.[/quote]Now that’s quality copy, ayup.
2 Likes
Werner Herzog reviews keyboards
2 Likes
Well, that looks suitably awful.
1 Like
“Already regretting assigning the review of the Republic of Gamers Claymore LED-Backlit Gaming Keyboard to Werner Herzog”
7 Likes
They are pretty common in places where people actually do need to type quickly(stenotypes are what, 1890s to present day for court reporters?); but there don’t seem to be that many applications where very, very, high speed is considered worth the expertise required to operate the system and the loss of all the various fiddly symbols that have gained assorted domain-specific uses.
It just appears that places where you need to type very quickly are comparatively rare. You can usually type faster than you can think, with a little practice, on an ordinary keyboard; and ‘can be implemented in software’ appears to be the highest law for keyboards serving sub-laptop devices.
I’m not sure I’d want to be typing on anything branded “Claymore” for fear of setting it off. 0_0
BRB, picking keycaps out the ceiling.
Stenographers don’t exactly type. The output is almost all weird-looking code that only they can read, that’s why they’re the ones reading back testimony during a trial when requested. The tape looks like this:
Obviously somone has to transcribe that into English before releasing the official transcript.
6 Likes
Conceivably, chording (full text, not steno shorthand) could be quite fast, but that would require some real dexterity, and if you can easily get 100+ wpm from touch-typing, the marginal gains just don’t seem like they would be worth it. As someone who uses the editing keys, symbols, and modifier keys a lot (and often the numeric keypad), these stripped-down keyboards strike me as a cute knockoff toy - a quarter machine keyboard.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
