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Comment by terofle | Hacker News Reader

> The ~ and \ have moved to the usual location of the Backspace. Working exclusively on UNIX systems now, I don't mind the \ being harder to reach. I could understand a Windows user finding this irritating.

This guy has clearly never used LaTeX.

I mapped my \ to a more accessible location and it improved my typing speed by factor 2 or so.

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>it improved my typing speed by factor 2 or so.

Is it odd that I've never found my typing speed to be a bottleneck worth optimizing? Maybe I haven't thought about it enough. While I overall type slower than I think, the difference is very slight and the result is more time to think about how to phrase things. I often find my hands freezing for .5ish seconds while my brain get stuck deciding on what the next appropriate word is.

When coding, it is even less of an issue and if I ever have anything to optimize on the level of typing it would be the auto complete not being helpful enough.

Very early in my career, I started to get RSI issues (before it was a well known phenomena). I limited my typing speed to 32 WPM and also enforced a rest every 30 seconds (originally by beeping the speaker every 30 seconds until I got used to it). I now type very slowly while programming, but usually I'm thinking continuously. Often I'm not thinking at all about the thing I'm typing -- the typing is waaay far behind. I'm convinced that this strategy both saved my hands/wrists and improved my coding.

Interestingly, I stream some free software coding I do on twitch (usually about 2 hours a day). I should watch myself and see what I do now, because I haven't really paid attention to my typing for at least a couple of decades. Though, my streaming dialog easily takes half of my brain, so maybe it's not what I normally do... ;-)

I type very very fast, and yet I know I can speak faster. Not all typing is careful crafting, and even to the extent to which it is seeing it printed out and then erasing parts and replacing them is a very effective way to test things out and save state. Most of my typing is just conversing, where typing notably slower than I can speak, as opposed to merely a bit slower, would be crippling. (And even if I am in a situation where I am waiting on someone else, well, then I can type fast enough to talk to two or three people at once.)

I rather like the position of \ and / in the ISO layout. \ is on the right of lshift and / is on the left of rshift. It feels nice and consistent.

I’ve been wanting to config emacs to change my special char layout from major modes to major modes. As such, i could make my backslash key easily accessible from latex-mode, but out of the way in python-mode. Get my backquote easily accessible from lisp-mode, but out of the way in other modes.

I feel like if i only have a few special chars to move around between modes, it should be easy to learn.

I’ve already inherited my xkbmap and changed the special char to something that suites me more and its been better on my fingers.

Also as a vim user I would like the esc instead of the control here but that is non Unix standard as far as I know. I also use Windows quite a lot so having the \ somewhere close is nice to have.

Though I really dislike the meta key next to the space-bar but that is just me not being old enough to have used non IBM compatible keyboards.

As you might have noticed, everybody's preference is different.

There are many ways to rebind caps lock to be escape on press and control when used in combination with another key. Karbiner elements on macos and xcape on Linux come to mind immediately. But some keyboard firmwares are programmable enough to do it themselves too.

However. What I found best as a vim user was to use ^[ as escape. It has the added bonus of actually being faster to process by vim too.

You don't need any extra software to map Caps to Esc on X11: Just enable the caps:escape option.

In context: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/6c4478...

You can also use xmodmap [1].

My xmodmap file has things like:

  ! Make Caps Lock be Escape and Scroll Lock be Caps Lock
  remove Lock = Caps_Lock
  keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
  remove Lock = Scroll_Lock
  keysym Scroll_Lock = Caps_Lock
  add Lock = Caps_Lock

After reading this post, I also reverted backspace and bar/backslash:

  keysym BackSpace = backslash bar
  keysym backslash = BackSpace

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xmodmap

EDIT: xmodmap link

XKB options have the advantage of also being understood by Wayland compositors.

Yeah. That’s cool, but I’m talking about conditional context switching.

ESC if pressed once.

CTRL it pressed with another key.

This is the sort of thing I'd want to modify the keyboard firmware for. QMK has explicit support for this kind of thing, for example: https://docs.qmk.fm/#/feature_advanced_keycodes?id=mod-tap

You can also use ^[ as escape, which on this keyboard is a very small motion away from the home row.

With Shift mapped to Escape, sure.

As another Vim guy, the ctrl key being so much closer makes ctrl-[ a little more appealing.

I was wondering why there was any need to move the \ character but then I looked up where it is in the US layout and it seems bizarre.

The UK layout has an advantage, it's to the left of the Z and is easy to type.

The UK layout has a whole extra key which also makes # easier to type because it does not require a shift.

This is why I'm glad that QMK exists. Because you're using a programmable board (where the keymaps/layers/etc) are stored on the keyboard itself you can move everything about and never worry about where your configuration is. And it runs all all sizes of boards from smaller stuff like [1] Gergo and GergoPlex to giant boards like the [2] Hyper7. Hell you can even get a addon board for a HHKB (Hasu Controller) and mod it in.

Although it's a bit of a rabbit hole. You start by moving around your control keys, maybe add a thumb backspace, a few months later you end up with a programming optimized symbols layer [3] and then maybe even adding in chorded stuff [4]. It's a bit of a trip and ruins 'traditional' keyboards.

[1] https://www.gboards.ca/

[2] http://xahlee.info/kbd/hyper_7_keyboard.html

[3] https://qmk.fm/keyboards/gergo/keymap.png

[4] https://github.com/germ/qmk_firmware/blob/gboards-update/key...

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