fusion_power
Advanced Member
Because it sucks.One innocent question ? Why are german keys required when it's accepted now in modern German to write those letters as combinations ? i.e. ü is accepted as ue, etc...
Because it sucks.One innocent question ? Why are german keys required when it's accepted now in modern German to write those letters as combinations ? i.e. ü is accepted as ue, etc...
In Scandinavian languages, you need three out of Ä Ö Å Æ, which makes it a bit tricky indeed to map them to vowels. In Norwegian and Danish mappings, you could put Æ on E, Å on A, and Ö on O, at least to me that seems to make some kind of sense. In Swedish/Finish mappings, you could put Ä on A, Ö on O (just like in the default German layout), and Å at some other spot near A or O (e.g. W, S, I or P). In French mappings, you could put É on E, È next to it on R, À on A, Ù on U, Ç on S, for example. In most languages, the most frequently used extra symbols are based on vowels.Since it only makes sense for germans to have AOUS for additional characters, it could be confusing to remember where they are compared to having them in the approximate correct position in a familiar looking cluster, if they aren't labled.
As an analog, consider, just for the sake of the argument replacing all 's' letters with 'zz', 'y' with 'jw' and 'e' with 'ij' in english. For the sake of the argument also consider those would actually be pronounced anything near their counterparts. Now type a sentence that has those and tell me it doesn't look wrong to you, though it (in this fictional example) is pronounced a bit alike. Taking used letters away and replacing them with combinations of other letters is not the same as having the actual letters themselves.Because it sucks.One innocent question ? Why are german keys required when it's accepted now in modern German to write those letters as combinations ? i.e. ü is accepted as ue, etc...I personaly hate ae ue oe for ä ö ü, it looks weird even if it's a "legit" way to write. It always looks like someone without a propper german keyboard wrote in german.
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+1But I do think that it would be better no to put the labels Ä Ö Ü ß on the keymat. That way, it looks more universal. You can still have those keys in those spots by default, just don't label them. That way, it's nicer for all the non-Germans, who don't need those symbols, or who want to put different symbols in those spots (e.g. Å Æ Ø).
Remapping keys assumes there's space for the keys to be remapped. The software part of having keys remapped is pretty much inevitable.as a foreigner, i give no shits that letters from my people arent included in the keyboard, but cant we have some software thing for different languages and their keys, so if you select german for example, shift/meta/pyra/ctrl/whatever+a would equal Ä while when selected finnish in software, shift/etc+ae would be Æ?
as a foreigner, i give no shits that letters from my people arent included in the keyboard, but cant we have some software thing for different languages and their keys, so if you select german for example, shift/meta/pyra/ctrl/whatever+a would equal Ä while when selected finnish in software, shift/etc+ae would be Æ?
There are several symbols that look like ': there's the apostrophe, the single quote marks, and the acute accent. On a normal keyboard, you would have an apostrophe key '; word processing software can automatically convert it to the correct quotes ‘like this’, and in Compose combinations, it acts like an acute accent so you can make e.g. á é í ó ú.My ideas to the layout posted in OP:
- ' and ' looks very alike, but one is important for grammar and the other for programming. If we include both, how do we make them look different? Cant we just keep the "real" one for grammar out and keep the programming-relevant?
System Request. It is mostly used for the 'Magic SysRq key': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
- What does the "SysRq" key? System reset? Sorry my oldest console was the N64 I might be too newschool :^)
Why? Keep in mind that AltGr should be sticky (like Fn on the Pandora), and I would argue to make the keyboard Shift also sticky by default.
- Two shift keys on they keyboard are indeed useful, but once you need AltGr you either have to use the right one on the keyboard or shoulderbutton. To make it consistend we could spare left shift. Then we could move Tab one down and use the Tab key for Esc, and the Esc Key at the AltGr Mode for something else like the other apostrophe.
In my proposal (http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/96ce05fe6ad1693cb29247f4d18b7974), the + and - buttons actually produce + and -, since that does indeed make sense.
- If (+) and (-) are labeled as + and -, it would be confusing if they do anything but not + and -. We could use the shift mode (or AltGr mode or both) to make them actual + and - keys, sparing the ones on the AltGr mode and use the keys there for ^ and °
In my proposal there is no Capslock.
- Who besides of shitposters needs Capslock? I would not use it (it would collide with my Esc-Tab idea
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Yes. Technically it is no problem at all. We just want to keep the number of labels per key low, because the keys are small so the labels will be hard to read if we have to fit too much stuff on them.
- Since äöü also exist in capital form ÄÖÜ this would be a 4-way usage of the key. As a german I would be okay with this but is it technically possible?
See discussion above. In my proposal there are no dedicated keys for dead acute/grave accents (also not in Saber's proposal, I suppose). I do propose to use Meta-apostrophe for dead acute (áéíóú) and Shift-grave for dead grave (àèìòù), as a slightly faster method compared to using Compose.
- Same with the accents ` and ´ since I can only see one of them. Or is the other a apostrophe? Hell!
Any particular reason why question mark should be a Shift key and not a Meta/AltGr key?
- Question mark should be on the shift layout. I would put the ( ) to the AltGr layout and put the = next to the ? and this way with my + - idea the = would be perfectly under the + and -
- Do we scroll with D-Pad?
Too bad would have been a nice position...In my proposal (http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/96ce05fe6ad1693cb29247f4d18b7974), the + and - buttons actually produce + and -, since that does indeed make sense.It's probably not a good idea to give the action buttons a different AltGr function, because that will confuse games that use action buttons and shoulder buttons.
- If (+) and (-) are labeled as + and -, it would be confusing if they do anything but not + and -. We could use the shift mode (or AltGr mode or both) to make them actual + and - keys, sparing the ones on the AltGr mode and use the keys there for ^ and °
Well the german layout has the question mark between 0 and return. And since the ? is an equal part of punctuation character to ! I would put it up there, too.Any particular reason why question mark should be a Shift key and not a Meta/AltGr key?In standard US-QWERTY, shift+90 is (), I don't think we should deviate from that.
- Question mark should be on the shift layout. I would put the ( ) to the AltGr layout and put the = next to the ? and this way with my + - idea the = would be perfectly under the + and -
Honestly, this is exactly why the keyboardInteresting how people assume what they use is THE standard, every keyboard I've ever owned has " above 2 and @ above ' - but I wouldn't assume that's standard just because I happen to live in Europe (and also happen to speak English as a first language....)
As far as diacritics go, you honestly cannot expect to support French, German, Finnish, Swedish etc ad nauseum from a single layout... (unless you make some awful mash up that inconveniences everyone... including people requiring diacritics)
Is that the right link?As promised earlier in my news post, here is the thread about the keyboard layout.
First of all, thanks for all the discussions and threads you already had here at the boards - a few interesting ideas arose, and one came very close to what I had in mind.
Let's start with some facts first:
Okay, of all the keyboard layouts I've seen at the threads you created, this seems to be nigh perfect in my opinion:
- The keyboard should be standard enough to be used by every normal user
- It should be balanced between text typing and coding
- It should have most of the keys a normal keyboard has (i.e. Pandora keyboard has issues with DosBox).
- The main languages used where the Pandora sold are English, French and German. It should support these languages as good as possible (with English being the main one)
- We should have a maximum of three characters per key: One with a single keypress, one with Shift and one with AltGr (which replaces the old Fn-Key)
- The most-used keys should get the best positions
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The French use hotkey-number diactrics. To make matters worse there are no dead-key diatric combos here.What do I like about it?
What issues are there?
- Mostly Standard QWERTY-Keyboard, including the Shift-Keys on the numbers
- Tab as a single key
- ä, ö and ü (German) as well as ' and ` (French) included
- Almost all normal characters are existant
- Even has two shift keys (useful for persons who don't use the shoulder buttons when typing, like myself
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And be rational - there is NO layout everyone loves. What we need to find is the best compromise for all users and usecases.
- Hard to type some key combinations like ALT-F4 (as you need to press ALT, ALTGr and 4 at the same time). Only used for old DOS-Games though
- ESC is not a single key. Would be nice to have it, but not mandatory (did work with the Pandora)
- Some keys missing: ', ° and ^.
- +, - and = is a bit too far in the middle (hard to reach for these common keys). Maybe we should move them with less used keys?
I for one would much prefer dedicated Tab to dedicated Esc. Even in vim, I manually tab in programming (auto-tab causes more problems than it's worth for me). But moreover, I find myself wanting tab-completion a lot in terminals on Pandora. Having the dedicated key in the normal position would be a big improvement over where it is now.I don't like hiding Esc behind AltGr. It's just too commonly used, much more common than, say, Tab. Especially Vim users will scream bloody murder at that.
I did not object to a layout that has these letters, You misunderstand what I said and probably didn't read what came before. I mean that German is not *much* worse than Finnish and I do type German with the compose key (including ä and ö) and since the combinations are pressed in sequence and not simultaneously, it's not difficult for me. You can use any localised layout that you wish. I just point out that the compose key covers the rest for me, and I would like a layout with it as a primary key. See below for what I mean by accented.Letter frequencies
ä: 3.577% (as common as 'c' or 'f' in english)
ö: 0.444% (about as common as 'k' and 'j' in english)
Try typing english while using 4 key combos for c and either k or j. 5 keys for capital letters.
EDIT: Also, 'ä', 'ö' and 'å' are not considered as "accented" versions of 'a' and 'o' in finnish, but rather their own letters like 'f', 'r' or 's'. For example "rähinä" and "rahina" are completely different words, so you can't just rely on people substituting 'ä' and 'ö' where necessary.
I meant "accented" as in {ascii base-character that has extra bits in its graphical representation}, do you know a better word for it (EDIT: found it in one of the previous posts: "letters with diacritics")? § is a non-ascii symbol, but not an accented letter, it is a ligature (EDIT: this was meant to say: so I can't use the term non-ascii; I'll use the term diacritic in the future). So, I am definitely not wrong. In addition, I did not object to having a German keyboard (it has äs and ös) or a French one. I merely assert that every one who complains about the compose key is a whiner. Because it is awesome. What I said was, that if you collect all non-acii characters of all european langauges, you will have a long list. Compose helps with that; it covers a lot more, than 4 localised layouts. I stand by my recommendation to have a compose centered layout in addition to German, French and UK.As has been said before: You're wrong, here. Those of us that use å, ä and ö in our languages have them not as accented letters, but as standalone letters in and of themselves. Which means that ä is about as common as p or b, and stuff like y, j, z or q is far less common than any of the åäö letters. And that is swedish - in finnish, ä is in eleventh place, before m, r, v, h, j...
Not that finnish should be the governing standard for how the keymat should be organized, of course. But the point is that the argument "well, those accented characters are just accents, so whatever" is wrong - those of us who use them in our languages, use them rather frequently![]()