Unofficial Keyboard Layouts

[levi]

Shifting focus from the keyboard to the screen sounds almost as bad to me. Plus how does it work if you're not running X at the time?

 

[comradekingu]

Was just an idea to not print additional letters everywhere. Mabye it could be keyboard shortcuts, and the modifier would only bring up a help screen to show you whats what.

Edit: I like A-Z in white, and then the other punctuation buttons in black, maybe that could be done to make it more distinct where things are.

 

[Saber]

Updated the action buttons to a wXYzAB pattern.

 

[Natsu]

With the added width, would it fit this way?

    2      
1     Y       
   A      B
       X

 

[bzar]

Personally, I like ED's proposal more than that. The 2 in that layout seems real hard to reach.

 

[_wb_]

With the added width, would it fit this way?

    2      


1     Y       


   A      B


       X

What added width?

The 1 looks like it's in nub territory and the 2 would end up between the 9 and 0 on the Pandora, which is not particularly easy to press.

 

[Natsu]

Isn't he making it a bit wider?   

Personally, I like ED's proposal more than that. 

That button placement is a bit more awkward.

If it was 5 buttons, you could have one smack right in the middle. :lol:

How about kind of like this? :unsure:

   1  Y       
   A      B                         
       X  2

or Crazer

   1  Y  2     
   A      B                         
   4  X  3

:lol:

 

[_wb_]

Isn't he making it a bit wider?   

Personally, I like ED's proposal more than that. 

That button placement is a bit more awkward.

If it was 5 buttons, you could have one smack right in the middle. :lol:

How about kind of like this? :unsure:

   1  Y       


   A      B                         

       X  2

or Crazer

   1  Y 2     


   A      B                         

   4  X  3

:lol:

Putting a button below B is not a good idea because of accidental presses when reaching for any of the main buttons.

Putting a button above B is impossible because the PCB has an anchor hole there.

 

[Natsu]

Putting a button below B is not a good idea because of accidental presses when reaching for any of the main buttons.

Well, I think that's the best placement since it's less awkward looking. Accidental presses seems to hold true for


all the bottom face buttons placements.

 

[Antartica]

Redesigned the Pyra layout on the first page.

 I also like it. For my own use I would redefine the "Super" in the top row of buttons to be the dead_acute, but that would be trivial to do with an xmodmap in the .xinitrc or equivalent. Good job .

 

[levi]

 

Putting a button below B is not a good idea because of accidental presses when reaching for any of the main buttons.

Well, I think that's the best placement since it's less awkward looking. Accidental presses seems to hold true for
all the bottom face buttons placements.

To me, the most potentially awkward thing I can see in ED's design is the stretch you have to do to hit the button above A/left of Y. It's the furthest from the corner of all the buttons.

That said, looking at it again on my Pandora, it's better than hitting the number keys, so it's probably not all that bad. And the top row (A, 2, Y) and bottom row (1, X, B ) is making more sense.

 

[Askarus]

Redesigned the Pyra layout on the first page.

Hey,

I also like it.

One request:

Is there a way to place FN keys on the "Z" and "Y" button that are not needed in pairs.

You know, I want to cut and swap them and having Brightness not besides each other isn't that nice.



Also I wouldn't like the Sym Key on the Shoulder button.

It's bad for gaming, especially PC games that don't support Alt and Sym as an input key.

You would have to code that manually then.

 

[slaeshjag]

On linux, it's not a real problem to use Alt in games as long as the window manager doesn't steal those keypresses. Ideally, we'd have a patched window manager that drops most of the hotkeys, except for stuff like alt-tab when a fullscreen progam is running.

Putting alt-gr on a shouldbutton is a very bad idea though, no games should ever use that button for anything but as a character modifier.

 

[_wb_]

Putting alt-gr on a shouldbutton is a very bad idea though, no games should ever use that button for anything but as a character modifier.

The thing is, I want to use the shoulder buttons for efficient typing. Not putting alt-gr on a shoulder button is a very bad idea because it will be the most important modifier key besides shift.

 

[slaeshjag]

I do agree that putting alt gr on a shouldbutton would make or break the typing experience on the Pyra.

However, it's kind of silly to not be able to use one of the shoulder buttons in games.

Unless games remap it.

That could work.

But then you don't get symbols in game.

Which might be less of a problem.

 

[Natsu]

Not sure how I feel about putting alt on the shoulder buttons.

Not sure what's wrong with this.

   1  Y       
   A      B                         
       X  2

That accidental presses argument means we shouldn't have X there. 

other options are

   1  Y       
   A      B                         
   2  X  

       Y       
   A      B                         
   1  X  2

Possibly this and wherever you want 2 to be.

   2  Y       
   A  1   B                         
  (2) X (2)

 

[Saber]

Redesigned the Pyra layout on the first page.

 I also like it. For my own use I would redefine the "Super" in the top row of buttons to be the dead_acute, but that would be trivial to do with an xmodmap in the .xinitrc or equivalent. Good job .

Thank you Antartica(and Askarus below).

For Super, I don't see why you couldn't remap to the acute symbol, but the problem here is there isn't an AltGr key on the L2 trigger. It's just a regular ole Right Alt. The reason here is while researching I learned(hopefully it's true what I'd read) we can't have an AltGr if we want to use another key for accessing the symbols on the Pyra that we would normally generate with a FN key. Since we won't have a hardware FN key, and we don't have enough keys for separate symbol keys like a regular keyboard, we have to use our one "Mode_Switch" option, which would normally be reserved for an AltGr, for our Sym key(s). You're probably wondering why we don't just use one or two AltGr for the symbols. We could, but then it wouldn't really be an AltGr key anymore, it would be a "Sym" key and, in our case, there are two of them which are simply renamed and unused but available Hyper_L and Hyper_R, which shouldn't conflict with any external keyboards a person might want to use.

For further reading, here's some of the many pages I looked over which might be helpful if the above is confounding:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MetaKeyProblems

http://blacketernal.wordpress.com/set-up-key-mappings-with-xmodmap/

https://faq.i3wm.org/question/2569/set-mod-key-only-as-left-mod-key/

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_hyper_super_keys.html

Botton line is we either use up our one Mode_Switch ability with the AltGr modifier(s) or with one or two Hyper keys.

Yeah, I know it's unpopular, but we'll always have Compose mode which can produce from what I've perused every special character an AltGr key can without needing precious keys for grave and acute on the mat as primes.

Redesigned the Pyra layout on the first page.

Hey,

I also like it.

One request:

Is there a way to place FN keys on the "Z" and "Y" button that are not needed in pairs.

You know, I want to cut and swap them and having Brightness not besides each other isn't that nice.



Also I wouldn't like the Sym Key on the Shoulder button.

It's bad for gaming, especially PC games that don't support Alt and Sym as an input key.

You would have to code that manually then.

If I'm understanding here, you want to move F11 and F12 to (Z) and (Y)? I remember you said you use the plus and minus keys often for ebook scaling as well as F11 for other work. I don't see why you can't if that's your preference.

Not sure what you meant about brightness my friend?

For your concern about one of the "Sym" keys on the shoulder, are you able to use the Alt key at all even after an attempted remap in those PC games? If Alt does assign to the game input, then R2's Sym key should as well, being that it's a regular software key and distinguishable from it's sibling Sym key on the main keypad, but with the same narrow ability we need for calling forth our punctuation marks and glyphs. If they truly are unsupported in those classic games, I'd say we could have only one Sym key on the main keyboard but set it to be a sticky key like the Pandora's Fn key(myself, I'd prefer two normal, non-sticky modifier keys to keep it less complex). 

I endeavored to convey some sense with all the above. I hope I prevailed. B)

 

[slaeshjag]

Alt-gr with space for user symbols is an unnegociable must. Preferably with alt-gr on a shoulder button. Preferably, all game buttons will also be mirrored as a joystick interface, so if a game needs to use the symbol button, it can do so.

 

[levi]

It occurs to me that part of the reason Fn can't (easily) be used as a gaming button on the Pandora is that it's a sticky button. In a previous post I outlined a simple way to make a modifier button also useful as a gaming button, but the algorithm breaks if the button is a sticky modifier (or rather, I can't imagine an easy way to make it work).


I'd propose the if a modifier is primarily accessible as a shoulder button it doesn't need to be sticky. Problem solved.

 

[_wb_]

Ideally, I would have the shoulder button modifier keys non-sticky and the keyboard modifier keys (also shift/ctrl/alt!) sticky. It may require some hacking to implement something like that, but to me that would make a lot of sense.

Also if keyboard shift can be made sticky, there's less need to have two of them on the keyboard.

The stickiness of the keyboard keys should be something that can be changed in software though -- you'll still want START and SELECT to be used as normal buttons too.