Ask HN: Best APL Keyboards. Any Ideas?

5 points·maremmano··2 comments

I'm really intrigued by APL and want to start grasping some basics.

I assume I'll need a specific APL keyboard. Could someone who already has an APL keyboard give me some guidance on choosing one?

Thanks a lot to the HM community!

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There is no need to have a specific keyboard. The actual solution depends on what APL you're using, but the principle is the same. The various symbols are available on the regular keys, and you use some way to indicate that you want the APL symbol rather than the regular symbol.

Dyalog has two different IDE's the support this. Ride uses backquote by default, while the windows IDE uses control.

Kap uses backquote in all its interfaces. Here's what it looks like in the web version: https://kapdemo.dhsdevelopments.com/clientweb2/

Likewise, BQN does the same thing, but uses backslash: https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/

When using GNU APL there is an Emacs mode available that provides an input method.

So the long story short, you should be able to get going with any array language without getting any special keyboard.

You don't necessarily need an APL-specific keyboard; APL characters can be entered from any regular keyboard, see https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Typing_glyphs. The advantage of an APL-specific keyboard would be the stickers/caps for maybe a bit of the learning period, but even then, the characters have mnemonics (https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Mnemonics).

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