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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Or just reprogram your keyboard (xmodmap) to make any button do anything you want.

For the windows folk, autohotkey does the trick quite well.

Or create your own alternate keymap with the officially sanctioned Microsoft keyboard layout creator[0] (I used it to recreate the exact Apple French layout[1]). Advantages are you can easily reinstall it, it does not need external software, and you can switch layouts easily with the OS language bar.

[0] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964665.aspx

[1] https://dl.dropbox.com/s/zwx8un3kp5f8q3k/Apple%20Keyboard%20...

I really thought some time about remapping the / on the german keyboard (which is Shift-7) to 7 and vice versa (yeah, http:77site.com7foo7bar7page.html). But in the meantime I learned to hit the keys properly and switched to another system altogether.

I'm curious - do you physically take the keys off and swap them when you do major mapping changes like this to make using it easier? Or just use touch typing/muscle memory and ignore what's written on the keys?

For me it's the latter. I learned to code on a US keyboard, because that was the only layout we had in Yugoslavia back in the day. Then I came to live in Chile, where you can't even find a US keyboard, and had to get used to not caring about what's written on the keys.

I use Colemak and occasionally one-handed Dvorak (when I'm having RSI issues in one hand or the other), but my keys are laid out QWERTY. Move the keys, and touch typing becomes much more difficult because you lose your "homing bumps" at the f and j positions. Also, learning a new layout is easiest with a diagram floating on the screen, not by trying to look through your fingers at the keyboard.

I am another Colemak user. I use a Truly Ergonomic keyboard on my desktop, and having to look at the keyboard because of the odd placement of enter, tab, quotes, etc. absolutely kills my throughput compared to my laptop.

Interesting. I had not seen that kind of keyboard before. Seems like having "b" on the left hand would also be distracting, but maybe that's how other people type.

The keys I remap are the non-letter keys (Caps, Control, Esc, Backquote, Backslash, Backspace) with all different key shapes, so I just have to go with muscle memory. (Of course, I'm remapping them because I have the muscle memory, so it's ok. ;)

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