Markovkeyboard: Keyboard layout that changes by Markov frequency
github.com
github.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)
A little dizzying to use but a great fusion of some nice concepts. And for its target audience probably a lot more possible than a traditional keyboard.
apt-get install dasher (https://packages.ubuntu.com/disco/dasher)
And here is Dasher's source code: https://github.com/GNOME/dasher
It was unusable. Because of the constant size changes you would hit the wrong keys and some were getting so small you couldn't hit them anymore.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/iphone-keyboard-learns-what-you-ty...
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
[2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Often I'm trying to type in names of wines, domaines, vineyards, etc. - the CellarTracker app is probably the destination of the majority of my keystrokes. I could swear sometimes that the wrong character got entered even though I was pretty sure I hit the right key.
And of course now I'll be hypersensitive to this possibility, and cherry-pick evidence to confirm my suspicions.
Indeed, I noticed that if I disable auto-correct then keep using very simple words, and short messages, I have much less problems.
Of course, answering with emojis mean no risk of typos.
Really the only downside is having to put a bit of effort into learning it, but for the amount of time I personally spend typing on the phone over the years, it's well worth it.
I also tried other keyboard formats. 8pen was kind of interesting, but I could never get it very consistent myself, it felt more like a gimmick.
I'll second the recommendation.
[0]: http://www.8pen.com/
>how do I make it stop?
That's the most frequent question I have when I try something new with my computer. Sign me "card-carrying TechnoDolt"
https://forum.colemak.com/topic/1858-learn-colemak-in-steps-...
I wonder if any research has been done since Colemak was released about the optimal keyboard layout for English. Because letter positioning is not the only concern - you also need to worry about how easy it is to type common sequences of letters - finding the optimal layout is probably a very hard problem, requiring sophisticated mathematical analysis.
I can vouch for the advantages of using Dvorak, but I would totally consider a switch if someone had a "provably optimal" layout.
1. you have a hard time with every single set of default shortcuts there is
2. as soon as you switch languages it falls apart
3. as soon as you are using someone elses Computer it falls apart
I started to use the English layout with some custom mappings (for Umlauts) entirely and never looked back. The gap towards the default German one is not too big to slow you down too much, yet programming doesn’t feel like a total pain.
On another note, I'm rather skeptical of Colemak and other layouts that overly resemble Qwerty. It seems almost certain that they're sacrificing some degree of improvement for similarity to the layout most people are already familiar with. That's the main reason I learned and continue to use Dvorak.
>I'm rather skeptical of Colemak and other layouts that overly resemble Qwerty. It seems almost certain that they're sacrificing some degree of improvement for similarity to the layout
You might be wrong about that, see http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?popular_alternatives for a rather in-depth analysis of keyboard layouts. Some QWERTY-like layouts manage to score overall better, although the difference is not huge.
Personally these days I'm more interesting in experimenting with different keyboard shapes rather than tweaking the layout some more. I'm currently playing with OpenSCAD to create a custom 3D printed split ortholinear keyboard in the spirit of the Dactyl.
Decreases parsability slighty because you might not be used to the visual pattern of the whole word, but unless you are writing a book, nobody will bother. Germans themselves would write it that way if the font has no umlauts or they are stuck with ASCII for other reasons.
I mapped right alt + a to ä, right alt + s to ß etc, which works quite well. The thing I like best is right alt + number for superscript number, because you can quickly make footnotes in any text that way.
What I liked about the neo layout is the concept of having different “layers”, for mathematical notations, greek letters etc. and this only shows how little thought actually went into most official layouts..
- QFMLWY - this is best layout obtained by relocating all QWERTY letters
- QGMLWB - this optimized layout uses a Colemak-like character layout [ie. where the P and ; keys are swapped]
- QGMLWY - this is similar to the layout above, but keeps ZXCV in place
It's an interesting project but the inconveniences of switching from QWERTY to an alternative already stops me from switching to Dvorak or Colemak, so I doubt I'll move to something even more obscure any time soon.
It's surprising that the layout didn't move more punctuation and symbols around - the Qwerty default positions for the comma and period are surely not optimal (bottom row, ring finger for period). I wonder what results one would get running the same algorithm but allowing these changes as well.
I bet a huge win would be moving the exclamation point, but I haven't figured out how to allow the program to remap shifted keys.
If I put in effort to tune the markov keyboard, I'll use the workman approach, right now the code isn't as smart as it could be.