Jumped the Synapse: Thoughts without sponsors!

These are my thoughts that don't fit in my other blogs. They'll eventually cover a large range of topics.

Friday, July 20, 2007

CarpalxQ Keyboard Layout

The layouts you see here are what I have named the CarpalxQ (Carpalx being Mr. Krzywinski's name for the base board; I have added the "Q" to reflect this rendition and the Qwerty heritage), an advanced layout, that achieves the efficiency rivalling the best keyboard layouts (62% of the letters most commonly used in English are directly below the resting fingers, vs only 26% on Qwerty boards), while leaving as much of the Qwerty design alone as possible.

The CarpalxQ achieves this by just six key trades steps (involving only two letters at a time), each of which can be done independently. It is therefore intended to allow a phased transition to this highly efficient board, by just moving the one key trade at a time. By providing a phased transition, a Qwerty boardist can still have decent work productivity, while advancing fairly quickly to a much advanced layout.

Upon completion and reasonable practice, one can reasonably expect to have a much faster typing speed for most people, and less RSI/Carpal Tunnel Syndrome injuries or symptoms. Thanks to Mr. Martin Krzywinski of the BC Cancer Agency for 75-85% of this layout (based off of his "Mod 1" modification of his most efficient layout).

More will likely be coming on this in the future .... for those who wish to remap their boards now, either as a full-out move, or just doing a single step, the actual key trades required for the CarpalxQ optimization involves these six letter trades: 1-E/K, 2-T/F, 3-N/J, 4-I/L, 5-O/; and 6-;/P

For those operating a Windows system, you can go to the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and make your change(s) and then upload them to your system. Repeat until you've achieved full optimization. Go here, to the appropriate Microsoft location. Once again, the CarpalxQ ....

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Alternative keyboard layouts

In addition to the Colemak, I've also found one that might work better, because of the relatively easy conversion ... the partial optimization carpalx, as seen here (I believe the theoretically lower mod 1 may work better because of the T H E layout ('TH' and 'HE' are the most and second most common digraphs in English), even though the improvement isn't quite as great ...

the other very promising alternative is a proprietary board, the abkey.

... another random musing