Keyboard layout review


cosurgi

http://janek.kozicki.pl/
Joined
Jul 30, 2008
Messages
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Location
Gdansk, Poland
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janek.kozicki.pl
Well, since I got my Pandora a lot of people keep asking what am I thinking about this keyboard layout. Let's make an experiment, I am typing from Pandora (of course) now, and from THIS word I won't be correting my words. so you will see how much butons do not react to presses being too "light" or too fast. But also me - not being used to this keyboard. That's a one way to measure.


Next - the Ctrl and Alt war: I must tell you that their positin between the nubs is quite good - they are within reach and used rarely enough to justify the weird finger combinations to achieve some shortcut. I didn't use vim or screen much, yet, so I can't tell you how it works with them. That wuold be in keyboard review part 2, after I used Pandora for a while. I could still argue that , . are not used often eough, but that's a moot oint, and Alt, Ctrl are in a well reachablle place.


Another ting: Tab and Shift - well they do bother me. I almost never use Shift on left side, and notice that on normal keyboard Shift is bigger on right side. But remapping all this is a quite comlex puzzle. For example if I changed places bewteen Shift and Fn I'd have Shift on right, but then all Fn symbols will be wrong. because they are optimized for Fn being on right. Maybe it would be good to hack keyboard driver so that when space is pressed together with some other key - then it's interprted as shift.


Typing with thumbs, well OK let me try that - I just picked Pandora from the table and typr with thumbs now. It is doable, but I am hating Shift even more now, especially when I tried to type letter "S". But tha could be solved with sticky keys, let me try that... (I enable sticky keys on accessebility options) OK now I can type "S" with just one thumb. But how did all those spaces in previous sentence get there (you can't see them, HTML is merging them together, you would need to reply and look at that part)? That must be because I'm not used to type with thumbs and tried to hold Pandora with my thumb and it happened too fast to notice this. Oh and the sticky keys aren' t working anymore now, they got automatically disabled for some reason, let me show you by typing "s". See?


Nubs - I redefined them to be a mouse scroll and mouse movenent, LR buttons are now mouse buttons, I'm missing middle mouse button now, pressing both buttons doesn't emulate middle button. There's an option for that (typing with Pandora on table now, thumb typing isn't for me) option for middle buttons in xorg.conf, but The "Mouse" section is missing from Pandora's xorg.conf so I don't konow where to add option:



Code:
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"


So definitely I can live with this keyboard. For basic stuff it' OK. However for more complex stuff, like coding in a plane on Pandora - I shuold start looking for some nice bluetooth keyboard. Or practice more with this keyboard, so watch out for eventual "keyboard review part 2"!
 
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Oh and I forgot about those £¥€§ keys. I still think that they are fricking stupid. Hmm maybe indeed moving Fn to left side would solve the Shift problem. I need to think about that. The problem is to remap the keyboard in such a way, that only minimal number of buttons change their mapping, so I won't have problems recalling it quickly in case if I forgot. This problem is hard.
 
Alright. About the same amount errors that I would make on my laptop if I went uncorrected.
 
So there isn't a section like this in the Xorg.conf?



Code:
Section "InputDevice"


that option should reside under this section for emulate3buttons.
 
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So there isn't a section like this in the Xorg.conf?



Code:
Section "InputDevice"



that option should reside under this section for emulate3buttons.
Exactly - it is missing. Apparently HAL takes care of that.



Putting



Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->


<deviceinfo version="0.2">


  <device>

    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input">

      <match key="info.product" contains="Wacom">

	<merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>

      </match>

    </match>

  </device>


</deviceinfo>


in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mytabletrules.fdi isn't helping either, but maybe this is closer to a solution.


EDIT: oh, of course, there's "Wacom" in there. I copypasted too much. I'll try this again.
 
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My new install of Fedora Core 14 doesn't even have an xorg.conf, looks like I need to keep with the times.. seems like yesterday I was editing a xfree86config file.
 
the only thing this tells me is that your backspace button isnt working....is there a way to fix this?
 
the only thing this tells me is that your backspace button isnt working....is there a way to fix this?
backspace is working, it's the delete that isn't. And so far the fix was not found. But I'll remap the YEN button for insert, and then it will all work.


Sorry, apparently I'm not good at writing reviews. I can just tell boring facts and complain.


I like this keyboard, but it's not for serious typing, for me. Too big fingers.
 
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i also have quite the large hands/fingers, though every phone ive ever had has had a physical qwerty keyboard and im quite used to it, so unless the keys are uncomfortably hard to press, i should be golden with this thing, they thumb typing qwerty keyboard may be the first thing that sold me on this beauty because of my past phone choices
 
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Oh, and I also forgot about missing Delete key. Well, it's really missing. That is quite annoying. After I applied http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/54106-del-doesnt-work/page__st__15__p__908414&#entry908414 I am missing Insert key, since it gets interpreted by system as Shift-Insert, not as Insert.
That one is such a blunder. Still can't believe they actually made that mistake.

quite the opposite. I am glad that it's just ONE such mistake. When I do whatever stuff, it never works on the first try. And when finally it's ready - it has some small flaw, discovered and fixed much later.


Well, if they begin selling custom keymats, I'll be the first in the line, of course. ED promised custom keymats after all. They just need to first sell about million of Pandoras. I can wait, I'm good at waiting.


Also, it is obvious that the custom keymat that I will be ordering will be different from my final design from time before I received Pandora. Now I have it, and I can try it. I underestimated the importance of Shift, overestimated importance of Alt, Ctrl. Now that I can try it in real life, the priorities moved a little. But I'm still hating those £¥€§ keys.
 
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quite the opposite. I am glad that it's just ONE such mistake. When I do whatever stuff, it never works on the first try. And when finally it's ready - it has some small flaw, discovered and fixed much later.


Well, if they begin selling custom keymats, I'll be the first in the line, of course. ED promised custom keymats after all. They just need to first sell about million of Pandoras. I can wait, I'm good at waiting.


Also, it is obvious that the custom keymat that I will be ordering will be different from my final design from time before I received Pandora. Now I have it, and I can try it. I underestimated the importance of Shift, overestimated importance of Alt, Ctrl. Now that I can try it in real life, the priorities moved a little. But I'm still hating those £¥€§ keys.
Always the optimist I see :D


My own unit has just arrived in the depot in the Netherlands and will probably be delivered later today. I'm looking forward to experiment with this stuff myself. It is as you say, an actual unit in your hands will certainly help validating our ideas.


Shift is a very important key, but as a heavy Emacs user I won't underestimate the importance of Alt and Ctrl. I will also be redesigning my own layouts. Ease of key combinations were always a driving factor in my designs.


I plan to make a simple keyboard layout editor at some point if none exist by then. Hopefully we can get a set of good keyboard designs which can be easily swapped.
 
Don't forget that L is shift and R is Ctrl. More tips over here:


http://pandorawiki.org/Keyboard


It would be very awkward otherwise.


Hold L to move around windows too big for Pandora screen.


I personally find the keyboard extends a bit too much to the bottom left and right edges, and wish the keys were a bit smaller but closer to the centre.


Well, it's good enough.


P.S. cosurgi, do you still have those templates that you used for those keyboard layout voting threads years ago? If you could make one of those for that page on the PandoraWiki using the current keyboard layout & assignments, that would be really neat, just saying. ;) You could use this image from ED: http://pandorawiki.org/Image:pandkey.jpg
 
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P.S. cosurgi, do you still have those templates that you used for those keyboard layout voting threads years ago? If you could make one of those for that page on the PandoraWiki using the current keyboard layout & assignments, that would be really neat, just saying. ;) You could use this image from ED: http://pandorawiki.org/Image:pandkey.jpg
Of course I still have it :) Can you add this to wiki? I didn't make an account yet, sorry.


here's link:


http://geo.hmg.inpg.fr/~janek/pan/printed_layout.svg


open with inkscape.


Only LR buttons have different label, than real Pandora. Easy to fix.
 
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