Crockford Keyboard | Hacker News Reader

Crockford Keyboard

jslegers.github.com

21 pointsmmastrac14 comments

Interesting. The toggle from "alpha" to "euro" seemed like a neat feature at first, but it's of course completely un-suited to fast typing.

Likewise, compartmentalizing typing into various groups (alphabetic chars, accented chars, capitalized chars, symbols, punctuation, etc.) is logical, but mostly incompatible with just about any modern keyboard workflow.

edit : after doing some further reading, I realize I was judging it based on a completely incorrect set of criteria. It's intended purpose was for non typists, single-hand typing or "environments where conventional two-handed keyboarding does not work" [1]

[1] http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/keyboard.html

> edit : after doing some further reading, I realize I was judging it based on a completely incorrect set of criteria. It's intended purpose was for non typists, single-hand typing or "environments where conventional two-handed keyboarding does not work"

Though even by these criteria it's poorly suited for any language not completely served by ISO-8859-1 (and some languages that even 8859-1 is sufficient for). This includes a number of European languages.

To me it is far better than qwerty for the on-screen virtual keyboards in cell phones.

Is there anything particularly interesting or useful about this keyboard design, or is it simply because it was designed by Crockford that makes it deserve mention? Aside from unsuitable for touch-typing, it looks like a common sense way to do it.

It looks like a nice single handed layout.

I'm not sure about having t, n, s on the weaker fingers.

The "Done" button is a toggle? Is that a side effect of this being a proof of concept, or was there some extra functionality in mind?

Edit: Answering my own question, since it looks like this was designed for touch/pen based input, it would probably hide the keyboard: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/keyboard.html

I can't see the point of this keyboard but if it is a good thing to have the letters run from a-z starting from the top-left it seems like the numbers should start with 1(or 0) on the top-left as well.

The point is that the vowels all run on the left hand side.

semi-colon is pretty hard to find..

I had a really hard time distinguishing comma from period on the number pad, too.

lol, I went to this site expecting a keyboard full of semi-colons... so there you go I guess...

Typing "var crockford = true;" is pretty tricky.

Really? I guess I'm more used to shitty smartphone keyboards but that was relatively painless. You only had to go to the "standard" symbols button twice.

It's as if the alphabet runs in order.

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