Conclusion / synthesis of the keyboard poll results

[Neelix]

Now people will always question wether i'm being serious and genuine, or just playing some deranged convoluted game....

Muhahahaha!

I think it's time to reinstate your "insane little creature" title.

-Neelix

 

[Natsu]

Now people will always question wether i'm being serious and genuine, or just playing some deranged convoluted game....

Why not do it all? Also, how you stated that sound like all communication, human interaction (maybe all animals), or just life.

Life is a deranged convoluted game that is both serious and genuine. Wether you're human, animal, or any thing.
I know who I Am.

The great pretender...

People fall for me every time. Hell, I fall for me every time.

Or just ignore you.

 

[FaeMinx]

Now people will always question wether i'm being serious and genuine, or just playing some deranged convoluted game....

Why not do it all? Also, how you stated that sound like all communication, human interaction (maybe all animals), or just life.

Life is a deranged convoluted game that is both serious and genuine. Wether you're human, animal, or any thing.

I know who I Am.


The great pretender...


People fall for me every time. Hell, I fall for me every time.

Or just ignore you.

I would say the vaaaaast majority ignore me insistently and persistently.

That's what makes this all so hilarious!


What a good idea it was making this all up, it's such fun!


If you managed to be super sneaky, super silent, tip toeing with the tippiest tippy toes...


... and caught God playing with himself.


*fill in the blank*


I ... I... can't take it... it's just so good. it's soooo bad! My god that was just the best. woohoo!


Just brilliant man, brilliant!

 

[Haraldur]

As soon as you locate space, which isnt a problem with single unmarked (from testing i conducted myself), you know where it is.

...

Bottom left and bottom right dont translate from a 10finger board, they are actually the least central positions.

I am not talking about knowing where SPACE is, but knowing that one's thumb is where SPACE is. There is a big difference. If the SPACE key is not unique, and its surroundings are not unique (as a corner key's are), then how can you (quickly, without counting or looking) know that it is indeed SPACE that your thumb is about to press? On the Pandora, SPACE, Q, P, Fn, (,) and the action buttons etc. are all unique and very easy to find. If a key is to be easy and quick to find (repeatedly), it must be unique, and for a single-wide SPACE to be unique, it must be on a corner, while a double-wide SPACE is unique wherever it is. In fact, a decent place for a double-wide SPACE (in purely ergonomic terms; it would be terrible for familiarity as it breaks just about every convention I know of) would be in the absolute centre of the keyboard (where F/G/H are on the Pandora), as then it is a big landmark in the centre of the keyboard enabling navigation to all neighbouring keys.

The central positions are the worst for finding a specific key reliably. The best are the corners -- on a Pandora one can feel the top left corner of the main keymat and know that the key is Q. For F that is more difficult. SPACE, as a frequently used key, must be easily and quickly found (without looking) -- this can be cone by giving it a corner position or by giving it a different shape and/or size.

 

[comradekingu]

Spatial awareness and motorical skill, there is no way around this, and its how typing works.

You can know where space is and blind type it, with your thumbs relative to your grip, same as with any other key, which for the purpose of blind typing, means you need to know where keys are anyways. Otherwise you are just typing space, that does nothing. It could be handy for adding a space in a text while operating the d-pad, much like a backspace to clear whitespace.

You are comparing bottom row not corner in both cases.

Adding onto the right side of space doesnt help here, having to feel your way there, for the first times before learning where it is, without looking, is suboptimal. It doesnt get the job done quicker. Its not efficient, and its a higher treshold way of learning.

Truly blind people, also don't benefit, Braille isn't a sequence of different shaped dots, they are all the exact same dots, position is what matters.

Efficient layout of space is in itself an improvement over optimizing for people who can only blind-type things in non-efficient places, not that that has any tangible benefit.

Besides, central middle space is out, if you want the benefit that brings, this is the closest i can get.

If you are fine with using shouldershift, you have space available at each hand. Same thing a central middle accomplishes.

Growing space in only one direction (towards more inefficient right) doesn't improve accuracy, if you get sloppy enough to widen your spread, all that does is put you on different keys often enough to null and void any benefit.

 

[Neelix]

Looks like it's a moot point now. The keyboard layout has officially been finalised.

-Neelix

 

[Natsu]

Just want to say, a big space button would be less typos than a small one and I'll leave it at that.

 

[rygD]

I am not so sure of that since people type other common characters just fine with them being on small keys.  I mean this in general.  Very few of us have actually felt the early Pyra keymat prototypes, and it may not compare to any other keyboard.  I also doubt very many of us have typed on keyboards that use a space that is the same size as every other key, so we can't really show it to be better or worse.

At least we have a kayboard, and it has a space key, regardless of the size.

 

[Caine]

Reply to post from Saber in The official news thead.

I don't want to turn that thread into another keyboard discussion, so I'm importing it here. I'll cross-link with a reply there to this post.

No, it has functionality issues to it. I've posted some needed changes here but I'll reiterate them anyways for the readers.

The problem with your layout is not that people haven't heard your rationale, they just don't agree with it. Repeating it over and over again is not going to fix that, it will only annoy people.You have a couple of points, so I'll address them here.

Junk symbols ° § € at significantly reachable positions while these ] } \ | are pushed away to and past the middle. No need to clone everything from a full-size German PC keyboard.

Junk? That's a selfish thing to say. Depends on usage patterns. I don't care about ° § but I do like the availability of €.

_ - = + are weirdly placed. If you, and it seems so, are imitating strictly U.S. symbol pairups then they shouldn't be arranged reversed like that.

I agree with this one. They are out of order and neither of them is in a harder to reach position so frequency of use does not really play a role here.

Brightness controls for screen and key backlighting, on one button, on the same side as the keyboard modifiers to use them. Please no looping.

Don't worry, looping is easily software controlled. Is brightness changing something you do so frequently that the combination of it should be super easy? For me it is fairly boolean (indoor minimum brightness, outdoor maximum brightness). I think that moving it just makes more important buttons harder to reach.

Is the keyboard Shift going to be a sticky key? It should be since ( and ) are unwieldy to reach without the L1 shoulder.

Software controllable. I would recommend the keyboard shift to be sticky by default.

All these are much more reachable: { } [ ] \ | _ - + =.

One of the aspects that people liked according to the polls was that shifted values were one row above the non shifted values on the Fn layer (i.e. DOSbox "cheat-sheet").You break this principle with / and ? and you reverse the direction for -_ and =+.

Removed Print Screen on Escape, which shouldn't like Enter have any modifier value.

While I agree with the principle, I rather have them paired then not having a Print screen button.

All brightness controls still reluctantly on one key but now easily accessible with the keyboard Fn. It's no longer clumsy to change brightness, which people tend to like to do sometimes.

I think sacrificing a comfortable shift+usr and Fn+shift+usr is worse than sacrificing a comfortable shift+brightness and shift+fn+brightness (see above).

While this improves things, I've also further pushed in the private layout discussion most of you are unaware of to move all brightness controls to keyboard-only Fn + Dpad, with Fn + Up or Down for display, and Fn + Left or Right for key backlighting.

Fn + dpad combinations is a bad choice because it is very likely to accidentally press that while gaming. You could utilize a keyboard-fn combination only, but that is rather confusing. In general it is not obvious without very ugly labeling around the dpad to easily communicate brightness changes on the DPAD.
Personally, I wouldn't mind the brightness key to be another modifier (e.g. HW modifier). That way the brightness key + dpad would change brightness and perhaps other hardware combinations such as "brightness" + W for WiFi, "brightness" + B for Bluetooth, etc.. Obviously it shouldn't be called brightness then. Previously I suggested these to be on the super layer.

 

[_wb_]

_ - = + are weirdly placed. If you, and it seems so, are imitating strictly U.S. symbol pairups then they shouldn't be arranged reversed like that.

I agree with this one. They are out of order and neither of them is in a harder to reach position so frequency of use does not really play a role here.

They are out of order for a reason though: it makes + and - closer to one another (on Fn+S and Fn+X).

If you would put them in the "correct" order while respecting the shift-pair convention, you would end up with + and - on Fn+D and Fn+Z, which means the distance between + and - would be larger.

In Saber's proposal, + and - are also close, but his proposal does not respect the shift-pair convention. If you're not going to have a shift-pair convention, then you can just as well put + as a neighbor of - on the same row, e.g. on Fn+A and Fn+S.

Other comments on Saber's proposal:

• ë and ï are overkill, these letters are rare in any language and no standard keyboard has them, so having ¨ on Shift+^ (like on a French keyboard) is good enough
• If you really want to cover French: you're still missing ù and œ
• ñ for Spanish is nice, but according to this source, ñ only has a frequency of 0.311% in Spanish, while ã has a frequency of 0.733% in Portuguese. So I'm not sure if we really need ñ; the Portuguese keyboard has ~ as a dead diacritic and that's it.
• The caron on Shift+^ looks nice and symmetric, but it makes limited sense from the point of view of languages. For example, why have a caron (only used in Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Letvian and Serbo-Croatian), but not an ogonek (used in Polish) ?
• Why F11/F12 to the left of User? Is there any reason not to put F11/F12 as far to the right as possible, to get it as close as possible to its expected position?
• Why are é and è reversed? There is no reason to do that: on a standard AZERTY keyboard the order is é è, and also é is more frequent
• While § is probably indeed not very useful, a lot of people like to have €, and I think ° is quite useful: it's used for all kinds of degrees (temperatures, arcs, coordinates on earth, alcohol content etc), and also (though the symbol is actually slightly different) as an ordinal indicator, e.g. 1°, 2°, 3° as abbreviations for primo, secundo, tertio.
• I don't understand the Shifted Shift symbol
• PrintScreen is nice to have.

 

[Caine]

They are out of order for a reason though: it makes + and - closer to one another (on Fn+S and Fn+X).

If you would put them in the "correct" order while respecting the shift-pair convention, you would end up with + and - on Fn+D and Fn+Z, which means the distance between + and - would be larger.

Ehhh...ok. The advantage of having them in the "correct" order is that it is easier to memorize where they are. What is the benefit of having them close? I don't see it. Is it an aesthetic one, pairing semantically similar keys or something like that?Either way, I don't care enough about it to fight for the change.

I agree with the other comments you made on Saber's layout.

 

[_wb_]

They are out of order for a reason though: it makes + and - closer to one another (on Fn+S and Fn+X).


If you would put them in the "correct" order while respecting the shift-pair convention, you would end up with + and - on Fn+D and Fn+Z, which means the distance between + and - would be larger.

Ehhh...ok. The advantage of having them in the "correct" order is that it is easier to memorize where they are. What is the benefit of having them close? I don't see it. Is it an aesthetic one, pairing semantically similar keys or something like that?
Either way, I don't care enough about it to fight for the change.

Pairing semantically similar keys. Helps in use cases where you need + and - to adjust something (e.g. zoom in/out or inc/dec some value), because then you often use both of them -- e.g. when zooming I often go like this:

[+] oops that's not what I meant [-] yes that's more like it [-] some more [-] some more [-] oops that's too much, better go one back [+]

 

[_jr_]

Pairing them 'intuitively' would be bad, because a lot of software package have key bindings with - meaning - and = meaning +. These would be broken by a non standard arrangement.

 

[comradekingu]

Looks like it's a moot point now. The keyboard layout has officially been finalised.

-Neelix

No, this is a day-fresh quote from ED:
"Finalizing the keyboard layout

Thanks to the poll and your comments, we were able to finish a keyboard layout that should be usable and satisfy most of you.

We will still work and tweak on the look of some of the symbols and char, but the functionality should be finished (unless someone finds a huge flaw here)."

Just want to say, a big space button would be less typos than a small one and I'll leave it at that.

 You saying it is not an argument, that is a belief. Arguments are on the table.

I am not so sure of that since people type other common characters just fine with them being on small keys. I mean this in general. Very few of us have actually felt the early Pyra keymat prototypes, and it may not compare to any other keyboard. I also doubt very many of us have typed on keyboards that use a space that is the same size as every other key, so we can't really show it to be better or worse.

At least we have a kayboard, and it has a space key, regardless of the size.

Some of us have actually tried putting space on z on a pandora, lo and behold it works just fine, it compares with any other two-thumb keyboard where shift enter backspace are singlewide, like the pandora keyboard.

If you change the size of the keys, and there are a few keys of that size on the pandora, it still compares to itself, like you allude to, if the rest of the keys are to small, there is no getting over that baseline level. If anything, changing the size will make them too small vertically. Adding a horizontal portion does nothing to alleviate that shortcoming.

 

[FaeMinx]

However, as in *huge flaw*, i dont believe ED means to concider singlewidth space.


I'm sure he's refering to layout only.


I would love to be proven wrong though.

 

[comradekingu]

Whatever you want to call it, its a wheel on motorbike design.

Its currently backed up by 51 to 33 votes.

Curiously many of those 51 also voted for what i thought to be mutually exclusive when i made it vote: "Functions more like a 2thumb keyboard, looks less like a 10finger desktop keyboard?". Some people did the opposite, but that vote is 27 to a meagre 5.

Those 33 and 27 are more-so, since it is an anti-legacy, and actually requires understanding the premise of the argument. Whereas the other is prone to misnormers.

If we further explore the design-by-community line of argument-by-indecies , someone knows something I, and people designing keyboards don't.

Curiously we now seem to differ in this matter, since "it has been decided" (when it hasn't) and issuing circumstantial apologies (when there is no fault to be made) is better reasoning than others can come up with or stand by.

That is not design, its an accident.

 

[ible]

_ - = + are weirdly placed. If you, and it seems so, are imitating strictly U.S. symbol pairups then they shouldn't be arranged reversed like that.

I agree with this one. They are out of order and neither of them is in a harder to reach position so frequency of use does not really play a role here.

 They are out of order for a reason though: it makes + and - closer to one another (on Fn+S and Fn+X).

If you would put them in the "correct" order while respecting the shift-pair convention, you would end up with + and - on Fn+D and Fn+Z, which means the distance between + and - would be larger.

I want to say that while they appear in strange positions, they will actually be very natural for thumb movement. + and - being in a natural thumb arc from each other, rather than being next to each other horizontally, will be a little bit easier for the thumb to alternate between. It will keep roughly the same "radius" but just adjust the "angle" in °s.

(And they make for some pretty easy code combos in this position, including but not limited to: <= >= += -= /=. You can't beat that with another ordering.)

 

[Caine]

I want to say that while they appear in strange positions, they will actually be very natural for thumb movement. + and - being in a natural thumb arc from each other, rather than being next to each other horizontally, will be a little bit easier for the thumb to alternate between. It will keep roughly the same "radius" but just adjust the "angle" in °s.

(And they make for some pretty easy code combos in this position, including but not limited to: <= >= += -= /=. You can't beat that with another ordering.)

Some valid points there. That is actually a usability reason instead of just an aesthetic one. Convincing enough for me to deviate from "the standard".
It is surprisingly hard to poke big holes into the layout. I love it Great work everyone.

 

[comradekingu]

Spoiler

If you put things close to shift and altGr you can combo-press them. For the purpose of using keyboard-only, that is quicker.

- is used in language, which is a lot more important than positioning it to be used in conjunction with +.

I like . / on the same button and html brackets in the same area, but in the bigger picture its another big loss to secure a smaller win, comma and dot does not belong in lower left, and its inefficient too.

Its used even more than -

To pick something that can just be fixed. Big versal letters arent the primary action of the letterbuttons.

Thus, they shouldnt be in the same position as the numbers (which are) that is inconsistent.

Changing big versals for small ones, or putting the big letters in the middle would fix this.

Bonus for getting all the Fn-labels i the same place.

 

[Natsu]

I thought you were going to say one last thing while I exit this and not go on to semantics. I expected too much.