Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)

Re:Workman Keyboard Layout (2010) by jarnagin on Thursday June 04, 2020 @02:26AM (#23413235)

One thing that often goes unmentioned when I see discussions about these sorts of alternate layouts is that, particularly for programmers, the keyboard isn’t just a simple device for entering text, it’s the mechanism through which we interact with our computing environment, and most tooling is either specifically or unintentionally designed to enhance the productivity of people typing in QWERTY. Whether it’s simple copy and paste, vim keybindings, shell commands, etc., using these sorts of tools from other layouts often feels much more tedious than it does in QWERTY. So I’d caution against adopting a new layout naively, unless you’re also willing to accept that you may have to also begin adapting your environment to your new layout in addition to learning the new board.

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Re:Workman Keyboard Layout (2010) by thomastjeffery on Thursday June 04, 2020 @01:52PM (#23419626)

This is why many layouts, workman included, make compromises.

After years of using vim, I learned workman. On top of my qwerty muscle memory, I have qwerty-vim muscle memory to unlearn.

I've gone back and forth, but I've generally given up on using vim. It's missing a feature that to me is a deal breaker: 100% configurable keybinds.

I've been looking into creating my own from-scratch modal keybinds for emacs. I would love something with the features of evil-mode where the user creates their own normal-mode.

Even if a user is using a traditional keyboard with qwerty, it still sucks to be stuck with hardcoded keyboard shortcuts. It would be extremely helpful if configurability were considered a necessity in UI/UX design.

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Re:Workman Keyboard Layout (2010) by unkulunkulu on Thursday June 04, 2020 @02:30AM (#23413259)

Yes, there is some idiosyncrasy with hotkeys, vim is quite ok (Dvorak user here). Overall I remember it being crazy for some time but currently I’m quite happy with the results in entering text and programming. For hotkeys I still have to make guesses here and there because some programs expect them to be pressed “as in qwerty”, others “as in dvorak”.

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Re:Workman Keyboard Layout (2010) by Graziano_M on Friday June 05, 2020 @07:46PM (#23435288)

That's one of the reasons I decided on Colemak years ago: zxcvbqw don't move, which is most hotkeys (undo, cut, copy, paste, etc), plus hkjl, for vim, is ATLEAST on one hand, but unfortunately it's all hit with the index finger.

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Re:Workman Keyboard Layout (2010) by toyg on Thursday June 04, 2020 @05:45AM (#23414562)

To be honest I never have any problem with that sort of thing with Colemak in terminals.

The only issue I have is in games, where WASM is a religion.

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Re:Workman Keyboard Layout (2010) by WorldMaker on Thursday June 04, 2020 @05:01PM (#23421731)

As much as I hate rebinding WASD in every game ever (and no two games share anything like a similar remap tool; every game's settings are a unique snowflake), it does at least amuse me every time that Colemak's replacement is WARS. It seems more appropriate for games, it spells out a vaguely appropriate word and R for Reverse actually makes sense mnemonically. (Walk, Around, Reverse, Sideways ;)

Though nearly universal support of Xbox gamepads and made me more of a gamepad by default player, saving WASD remapping for rare cases.

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