It's the keyboard layout.

[bzar]

Maybe it's as you say one pair tethered mechanically together as one button in unison

Exactly that. Both pads are tied together such that when one is closed the other in the keyboard matrix is closed as well. You can't have a situation where both switches are closed and then one is opened because so long as one is closed they both are, at the physical level. It's a very easy-to-cut trace so no problem for someone with an interest to split them apart and get two distinct keys out of it. From my understanding ED intends to keep it the same on the Pyra.

This. To clarify, if Saber tried to solve the two right shifts issue this way, they would be indistinguishable in software and as such not at all remappable individually.

 

[Saber]

The French have a penchant for making things that don'tmake sense. The issue is there for everyone else (period).

What about the Japanese? Do they expect us to believe Godzilla could traipse through Tokyo and not get a single foot splinter?  

 

[myNewUsername]

 

So if you only need acute on the letter E (éÉ), like in French which only has an acute on that letter, then that default Meta+V would be good enough for your needs.

You are of course right about this. 

Thanks

 

[_wb_]

The pandora layout is a hack. Its a crux when you do the same thing when you dont have to.

wb: Why so cryptic, whats wrong with the US international diactric-symbols? And why not all of them?

The french will look for their letters on number row, because thats where they are used to finding them. Big and small versals with shift makes sense too, albeit isnt standard. All of which is only possible while maintaining more important things (US shiftrow symbols) by having a language-layer key.

US-International has only grave, tilde, acute, umlaut and circumflex. I have all of those, in the same spot as US-International (` ~ ' ") except for circumflex, because Meta+^ is already taken for Shift+F6. Unless of course you map to the "real" US-International, which makes ` ~ ' " ^ all dead keys, with no option to get just the symbol except by adding a space after the dead diacritic.

Of course you can always use my layout and set your keyboard layout to US-International, which means Right Alt (R2) becomes AltGr and you get ÅØÆ at AltGr+WLZ, and « »  ¬ ¶ ç ¡ ² ³ at AltGr+[ ] \ ; , 1 2 3 and so on. Could be practical if you are already familiar with US-International; in particular, for Spanish US-International is quite good since it has áéíóúñ easy to remember at AltGr+aeioun.

The French who expect to find AZERTY with éèà on the number row are screwed anyway, also in comradekingu's proposal, because we have QWERTY, not AZERTY the number row is misaligned, which is a big problem if it contains letters (imagine the QWERTY row shifted one position to the right w.r.t. the ASDF row). Perhaps you can expect French people to blindly swap AZ and QW and put M at L+1, but you can't expect them to blindly remember all of the AZERTY number row symbols, AltGr+symbols and punctuation symbols, which are completely different than on US-QWERTY.

No, I think it makes much more sense for French people to adjust to US-QWERTY, as long as they can type àèé reasonably efficiently (frequently used letters) and çùâêîôûäëïöü in some way (it doesn't have to be a single thumb press for those letters, but preferably something faster than a three-thumb-press Compose sequence).

 

[sebt3]

The French have a penchant for making things that don'tmake sense. The issue is there for everyone else (period).

Yeah I know.
Building the Eiffel tower (most visited place of the world) made no sense.


Building the Suez Canal didnt made any sense.


Building the Panama Canal didnt made any sense either.


Building the first plane ever was a complete mistake.


I think you're right, french men are used to build senseless stuff.

 

[benoitb]

Well, I have to admit azerty is not the most logical keyboard layout, with the "." being behind a shift while ":" nd "!" are direct-access.

 

[codifies]

Well, I have to admit azerty is not the most logical keyboard layout, with the "." being behind a shift while ":" nd "!" are direct-access.

Still its no excuse for casual racism, interesting how a personal attack was censured (rightly so) yet the racism slides by...

 

[comradekingu]

The pandora layout is a hack. Its a crux when you do the same thing when you dont have to.

wb: Why so cryptic, whats wrong with the US international diactric-symbols? And why not all of them?

The french will look for their letters on number row, because thats where they are used to finding them. Big and small versals with shift makes sense too, albeit isnt standard. All of which is only possible while maintaining more important things (US shiftrow symbols) by having a language-layer key.

US-International has only grave, tilde, acute, umlaut and circumflex. I have all of those, in the same spot as US-International (` ~ ' ") except for circumflex, because Meta+^ is already taken for Shift+F6. Unless of course you map to the "real" US-International, which makes ` ~ ' " ^ all dead keys, with no option to get just the symbol except by adding a space after the dead diacritic.

Of course you can always use my layout and set your keyboard layout to US-International, which means Right Alt (R2) becomes AltGr and you get ÅØÆ at AltGr+WLZ, and « »  ¬ ¶ ç ¡ ² ³ at AltGr+[ ] \ ; , 1 2 3 and so on. Could be practical if you are already familiar with US-International; in particular, for Spanish US-International is quite good since it has áéíóúñ easy to remember at AltGr+aeioun.

The French who expect to find AZERTY with éèà on the number row are screwed anyway, also in comradekingu's proposal, because we have QWERTY, not AZERTY the number row is misaligned, which is a big problem if it contains letters (imagine the QWERTY row shifted one position to the right w.r.t. the ASDF row). Perhaps you can expect French people to blindly swap AZ and QW and put M at L+1, but you can't expect them to blindly remember all of the AZERTY number row symbols, AltGr+symbols and punctuation symbols, which are completely different than on US-QWERTY.

No, I think it makes much more sense for French people to adjust to US-QWERTY, as long as they can type àèé reasonably efficiently (frequently used letters) and çùâêîôûäëïöü in some way (it doesn't have to be a single thumb press for those letters, but preferably something faster than a three-thumb-press Compose sequence).

But they can remember what button it was on when it wasnt on numbers at all? Number for number is still better than something new, or a different system.

 

[_wb_]

Well, I have to admit azerty is not the most logical keyboard layout, with the "." being behind a shift while ":" nd "!" are direct-access.

Still its no excuse for casual racism, interesting how a personal attack was censured (rightly so) yet the racism slides by...

"French" is not a race though

Anyway, moving on, should we continue to explore the "left-aligned" option à la http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/bcb0a44b3ad7a399117c436f7266b0a8

or should we stick to the "centered" approach à la http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/0b99ecad9af3db480acff3346300446b

?

Here is a variant on the "left-aligned" approach:

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/228495bde6c2da2b042b634d168df24a

It allows you to keep primary , . when remapping primary üöä/åöä/åøæ/åæø, at the cost of losing Tab and keyboard shift, and moving - + to the Meta layer. Those who don't need those three extra letters get a dedicated dash/minus key, near its normal spot.

 

[codifies]

"French" is not a race though

The French - refers to the race of people living in France...

And you can use a baguette as a stylus for the touchscreen.

Yeah - quite ingrained with you isn't it

regarding the layout left or right oriented - The majority of people are right handed ("Studies suggest that 70–90%" according to wikipedia) so holding modifiers with the left thumb and pressing different targets accurately with the right would seem easiest for the majority?

 

[sebt3]

And you can use a baguette as a stylus for the touchscreen.

This passive-agressive comment is far from welcomed here.


Insult is the arguements when someone have nothing more to add to his point of view.


You failed, hard

Retracted just like you did fair enough

The French - refers to the race of people living in France...

Yet, still *not* a race. Our race is Western European but dont cover only France

 

[ible]

perhaps this thread should be locked. it's a little off topic and things seem to be getting a bit too heated.

let's cool our keyboard-making jets and wait for the inevitable news.

 

[codifies]

Yet, still a race. Our race is Western European but dont cover only France

Alas I wish Europe really was that united...

I too think we'd all be better off from a few weeks off from thinking about keyboards...


Maybe it might allow people time to take on board other peoples ideas and allow a melding of all the best ideas.

 

[Grench]

Anyway, moving on, should we continue to explore the "left-aligned" option à la http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/bcb0a44b3ad7a399117c436f7266b0a8

or should we stick to the "centered" approach à la http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/0b99ecad9af3db480acff3346300446b

?

Here is a variant on the "left-aligned" approach:

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/228495bde6c2da2b042b634d168df24a

It allows you to keep primary , . when remapping primary üöä/åöä/åøæ/åæø, at the cost of losing Tab and keyboard shift, and moving - + to the Meta layer. Those who don't need those three extra letters get a dedicated dash/minus key, near its normal spot.

I'm not a fan of the 'left aligned' designs, but if there were a version with properly paired symbols I might give it more consideration. ('DosBox compliant') Symbol pairs are broken and spread all over the place.

The above centered version is still a failure to me. Again, symbol pairs are broken and spread all over the place.

Some of your newer ideas (Greek and math on dead keys) are interesting, but frankly, I can't stand the rest of the layout they're being applied to.

Maybe a hybrid of these two?

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/0b99ecad9af3db480acff3346300446b

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/467f092b9169fe6c6b411baa5a39beeb

I don't have time to make one today.

 

[_wb_]

Here's a Grench-compatible left-aligned layout with comradekingu-style P+1, L+2 remapping options:

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/3beb632035d15fd830271fb1c937c4ac

Biggest problem: keyboard Meta and Shift cannot be mashed, so {}|~_+?: are not comfortable using the keyboard alone (you would have to do Shift+Meta first to get sticky ShiftMeta, then the letter key that has the symbol). Of course those who use shoulder button modifiers don't have this problem.

 

[_wb_]

Here is a somewhat more radical layout idea:

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/88ca710d77cf497fc9fe352211a409f6

• Grench/DOSBox compliant
• no Meta in the lower keyboard section, it moved to the Pandora logo key
• no primary Tab
• lots of primary punctuation keys:  ; ' , . -
• letters which often have diacritics (vowels AEIOU, also S for ߪŠ, Z for ŽŻ, C for ÇČ and N for Ñ) don't have a Meta label, so language-specific stuff can be mapped there
• P+1, L+2 are important-but-not-so-important punctuation symbols, so they can become Meta keys and primary ÅØÆ or ÜÖÄ etc can be mapped there

 

[_jr_]

Thanks, I was thinking of something along this line for the last days. Why not go all the way and remove all non printing keys from the main area and all modifiers from keys, e.g. change: keyboard Alt to INS, keyboard Ctrl to DEL, INS to BS, DEL to Enter, BS to -, - to [, Enter to ]. This leaves the main keayboard area with just 4 symbol meta bindings (besides F keys and without counting currency, math, and greek): ` = / \ as well as Tab. I'm not sure whether the keyboard shift should be the Meta or whether Tab or \ should be put there. Single width space would additionally allow / to be moved to where it belongs (and possibly enable a viable canadian french mapping). I admit that I have no clue whether this would actually be usable, but it seems to be as close to a real keyboard as it could possibly be.

 

[Grench]

Loss of mashable meta+shift makes both of those into a bit of a train wreck. I don't think that left-aligned with a double-wide trailer space is going to work.  The loss of functionality is just too much to overcome.

I made an attempt at left justified while retaining Fn+Shift capability.

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/adb6cc0407b110afb2c312eddda04f9e

I'm not a fan of that one either.  To 'make it fit' I had to put backspace on Fn+space, which sort of makes sense in a cruel way AND the keys that had to go to the L+1 and P+2 (yes, I know...) are far too common to relegate to these 'remapping' positions.

I still like this one best:

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/467f092b9169fe6c6b411baa5a39beeb

The only 'flaw' that seems to really bother people is the lack of a 'dedicated tab' button.  (Even though it's MUCH easier to use than the one on the Pandora.)

So, I started thinking - how to do that WITH a dedicated tab...

There wasn't as many screams of agony as I would have expected from a shifted over number line so...

Since backspace is anti-space, could be Fn+Space...

One of the things I like about the above example is that it maintains the main diacritic keys 'on top' so that they're Fn+key paired to their root symbols...

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/5cb09bc085edf78d3847f884cd527f23

I considered swapping Comp and Backspace, but backspace as anti-space as Fn+space was just too tempting.

 

[_wb_]

Talking about: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/5cb09bc085edf78d3847f884cd527f23

Backspace as a non-primary key is a huge no-go for me.

If you really want to misalign the number row to make room for `~ left to 1, then Backspace should be either where Enter is, or else it could be where Del is. Then the two extra action buttons could be Del and Backspace (there's a symmetry to that) and Ins could go on Meta+Space.

 

[bzar]

Yet, still a race. Our race is Western European but dont cover only France

Alas I wish Europe really was that united...

Race is a bad term for this. Ethnic group or national identity is probably closer to what you mean. There are no clear biological races within humans.