erwan's code blog

While switching to the dvorak/svorak keyboard, one issue I faced was that as long as I could see letters and signs on my keyboard's keycaps, I would keep on looking at them while typing. The only way to force myself into true touchtyping was to erase all letters and signs from all the keycaps.

I tried a few methods.

The first one was to take a standard qwerty keyboard, take out all the keycaps and spray them with model paint. That didn't go well: the paint ran under the keycaps and jammed the part of them that glides inside the keyboard, hence making the keys hard to press. But I guess someone with more experience of spray paints would have done a better job.

My next attempt worked better: I purchased double sided tape, cut small paper bits and sticked them on every keycap with the tape. After a few weeks though, the paper had turned from white to greasy grey and I had to replace them.

Finally I went down to the closest beauty shop and purchased a number of cheap nail polish tubes. After a few attempts I finally got my hands on a few colors that fit for keyboard painting: white, black, electric blue and the like. It was important to find non-transparent paints. It worked very well. Now my typematrix looks like this:



I had to take out each keycap, one by one, cover it with a generous layer of nail polish, something like 4 or 5 strokes per keycap, and let the keycaps dry over night. Be careful with keycaps that are already painted: don't attempt to add paint to them until the first layer has completely dried out or you will get irregular coatings. And operate in a well weathered place, the smell is rather strong. There shouldn't be too many particles in the air too, or they will stick to the paint.

One month has gone by since I switched to the dvorak layout, or to be exact to the swedish variant called svorak a1.

Time to take some distance and look at how the ride has been going!

Well, I am still using svorak. The first 2 weeks were tuff and I seriously pondered giving up. Now the worst is over. I type at a reasonable speed of about 22 words/minutes. Still sluggish but 1) I am truly touch typing 2) my performance are improving daily with a rate of about half a word per minute and per day.

I had to overcome a number of obstacles and am still struggling with a few of them...

I am quite disappointed at the typematrix keyboard that I am using. Since I am mostly programming and using emacs heavily I find myself hitting altgr all the time. On the typematrix, altgr is placed at an impossible angle for the right pinky. I reconfigured the keyboard mapping using the program KeyTweak provided by Typematrix and moved altgr to be just on the right of the space bar, where pgup was, so as to reach it with my right thumb. It feels better but it's still uncomfortable.

I used Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator to define an own variant of svorak with the symbol keys at more comfortable positions. That was a clear improvement and my fingers now seldom leave the 3 central keyboard rows.

I also wrote a couple of layouts for x-win...

So I have been learning a lot, both in how to improve the keyboard layout to reduce finger movement and in keyboard design. And since it's a lot of fun, I will keep on with it!

Now I am limited in my experimenting by the position of the typematrix's keys. And I am irritated at the little use I have for my thumbs. Ultimately, I would like a keyboard with keys placed like that http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/classic.htm or that http://www.newstandardkeyboards.com/Products_S.html

But in a perfect world I would also like the keyboard layout to be programmed in the keyboard encoder, at the hardware level, in order to avoid all the messy business of software layout remapping. So that's what I am looking at now: building my own ergonomic keyboard!

Getting the svorak layout to work smoothly on windows wasn't as simple as I first (naively) thought... My setup is somewhat unusual too: windows xp, typematrix 2030 keyboard and x-win32 as local X server. I am using the svorak layout known as Likets version (Svorak A1).

The first step was to configure windows to use the svorak layout.

A portable way to do that is to run this AutoHotkey binary, but this won't cooperate well with x-win32.

A better but more violent solution is to copy this keyboard dll into C:\WINDOWS\system32\, then edit an existing keybord in the registry to use this dll instead of the original one. You could for example replace the american dvorak layout with our svorak variant. To do just that, start regedit, open the path "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\00010409\" and edit the key "Layout File" to contain "SVORAKA1.DLL". Then reconfigure windows to use the 'American (dvorak)' layout as default for your keyboard and restart windows. Next time you logon you will be typing in svorak :) Of course, you won't be able to use the real dvorak layout anymore after this change...

Now remains to configure x-win32: copy this file into x-win32's lib directory, normally under "C:\Program\StarNet\X-Win32\Lib". Then find the 'input/keyboard' configuration menu and set the default keyboard to 'Svorak (svorak-XWin32.kbd)'.

Voila!

Dvorak layouts...

This seems to be one of those geekish topics that systematically ends up in a neverending holy war between believers and sceptical pragmatics. Both groups have convincing arguments on their side. As for myself, I am inclined toward the pragmatics' side: why going through the mind blowing frustration of learning from scratch a new layout when my fingers are already fluently typing on an other completely different and much more standard layout?

Not to mention the hassle of having to switch layout on every computer I will ever work on afterwards? And having to learn to touch-type for real? Because if I keep glancing at the keyboard, I am going to get all confused. Plus the fact that the default dvorak layout doesn't support my two other main languages, French and Swedish? And that I would need to get this new layout working under both windows, mac osx and the various linux flavors that I am using daily? And worst of all, learning over all my emacs shortcuts!

It feels like a bit too many obstacles in exchange for a hypothetical gain in typing confort...

But then, how can I really know it isn't worth the pain if I don't even give it a try?

So I did it: I just switched to dvorak.

I found a layout that fits my needs: svorak a1, described here. I got it running under both osx and windows (though a bit painfuly for the later: I had to compile an AutoHotKey binary for svorak a1).

And to get things right from the start, I bought an ergonomic keyboard, a typematrix ezreach 2030. To avoid the temptation of glancing at the keyboard, I covered all its letters with small white paper stickers :)

Now the sheer geekiness of my desktop setup frightens me: dual screen, weird looking keyboard with half the keys hidden behind greasy small paper bits...

I am giving dvorak 1 month to convince me.