[HN Gopher] Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)
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Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard (2012)
Author : lelf
Score : 23 points
Date : 2024-06-04 11:44 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.daveperrett.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.daveperrett.com)
| akasakahakada wrote:
| Similar thing. To avoid my fingers fighting each other when
| pressing cut copy paste in Macbook, I almost bought those 20-key
| left hand gaming keyboard so that I can do them in a single
| keystroke.
| kleiba wrote:
| You can remap keys on any keyboard layout, no need to get a
| Japanese keyboard.
|
| Many years ago, I was working in a German lab and their keyboard
| layout is really impractical for programming in C-like languages
| because all commonly used symbols are really awkward to type. I
| wasn't well-versed in XFree86 then (or today for that matter) but
| I remember I could solve the problem by simply changing they map
| that Emacs uses to map keyboard keys to input events. In other
| words, I was still using a German keyboard but when I typed
| "blindly", it behaved like a US keyboard. I even had some keys to
| behave context-sensitively, i.e., the same key stroke would
| produce different symbols depending on where the cursor was
| positioned in a buffer. That was actually tremendously useful.
|
| So, if you wanted some other key to give you and underscore
| without having to hold down Shift (which I don't get why this is
| a problem in the first place, it's not like we don't have auto-
| complete in our IDEs), there's multiple ways you could achieve
| it.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Especially on keyboards with blank keycaps. :)
| kleiba wrote:
| It wasn't one of those, but yeah. It wasn't an Optimus
| keyboard either, unfortunately ;-)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Now that's a blast from the past in typing class. I remember
| hearing people complaining about this or rather using it as a
| horror story about the class. Of course by the point in the
| class you use these, you've passed the point of being
| expected to know where the keys are and it is pretty much an
| advanced part of the class.
|
| Not sure if that's your reference or not???
| chaorace wrote:
| A not insignificant number of keyboard enthusiasts prefer
| to use blank keycaps. It's often merely an aesthetic
| choice, but those who like to tinker with custom layouts
| also favor them because that lets them skip shuffling
| keycaps around following a layout change.
| seritools wrote:
| This is the main reason why I just use the US ANSI layout in
| germany, together with KbdKaz on Windows for umlauts and a lot
| of other extra characters and accennts: https://www.omega-
| com.pl/kbdkaz.htm
| netsharc wrote:
| For a while the pile of crap that is Windows 10 got very
| drunk about keyboard layouts (maybe in combination with
| connecting to a remote desktop to a computer with a different
| set of layouts). Being in Switzerland with Swiss German,
| French and Italian layouts, and having just German and
| English on the client computer, it would lie to me and claim
| the layout is English when it's German, etc, etc, and the
| control panel would even lose layouts...
|
| Fun fact: amayon.de redirects to amazon.de
| karmakaze wrote:
| Seeing as it wasn't mentioned, there's a Ukelele[0] app for
| making keyboard layouts for macOS. After installing a layout,
| switching is as easy as tapping 'fn' by itself or using the
| keyboard menu icon. For Windows there's MS Keyboard Layout
| Creator[1].
|
| [0] https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
|
| [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/download/details.aspx?id=102...
| mrweasel wrote:
| The downsides aren't unique to Japanese keyboards. On Danish
| keyboard " requires the use of the shift key, same for = and the
| \ in on the 7 keys, along with /, requiring you to hit option +
| shift + 7 (on a mac keyboard, I believe it's Alt + shift + < on
| none Apple keyboards).
|
| The Japanese keyboard in the article does have { printed on a
| key, it's Option + Shift + 8 and the Danish Mac keyboard, and the
| key isn't labels with {, } is on the 9.
| kleiba wrote:
| As a decade long Emacs user, I can not follow: what's the
| problem with modifier keys?!
|
| Just kidding, I know that some people have a hard time typing
| them, especially when your day job consists of doing exactly
| that for eight hours.
| Jensson wrote:
| > what's the problem with modifier keys?!
|
| Lets say your keyboard requires modifier keys for a specific
| symbol, but your program treats that input differently
| depending on whether modifier keys are held or not. Or
| another bad one, lets say your keyboard requires multiple
| strokes for a specific symbol, for example backticks, and
| your language uses backticks as quotes...
|
| So many language and programs designed with strange symbols
| and keyboard modifiers are close to unusable in other
| keyboard layouts.
| kleiba wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to clarify. All the things you
| point out were actually clear to me (I was just kidding
| after all) but I think it doesn't hurt to give some good
| examples to illustrate the actual underlying issue.
| wormius wrote:
| Laughs in Perl
| kleiba wrote:
| How fun - I have no recollection of that discussion from 12 years
| ago, but somehow I just found out that I commented on that thread
| back then:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976669#3981000
|
| (Don't click, it's not worth reading. Pretty much like this
| comment, too, sorry.)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3980866 - May 2012 (40
| comments)
|
| _Underscores are stupid_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976669 - May 2012 (127
| comments)
| nbzso wrote:
| Get a Kinesis Advantage or the newest keyboard. Your hands will
| thank you later:)
| red_hare wrote:
| > ALT-yen-mark to get a proper backslash
|
| I believe this is an artifact of JIS_X0201, which is, to my
| knowledge, the first major Japanese 8-bit encoding and mostly
| 7-bit ASCII + Katakana (that character set you see in old
| Japanese video games) and some Japan-specific symbols filling the
| other half of the 8-bit space.
|
| In it, byte 0x23 was changed from "\" to "Y=".
|
| The history is fascinating:
|
| > The 1964 ISO draft reserved the positions 0x24 and 0x5c for
| first and second currency symbols to be assigned by each country,
| but it was considered too dangerous in international
| communications to use currency symbols that could be localized.
| The ISO committee had two options that to use a generic currency
| symbol ($?) or to give the dollar ($) and pound (PS) signs
| permanent assignments. It was agreed that the dollar sign was
| assigned to position 0x24 and the pound sign was to position
| 0x23. The latter was not required in countries that did not need
| the pound sign. The JIS committee decided to put the yen sign
| (Y=) in 0x5c (one of the national use positions).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0201
|
| It's legacy lived on in Shift JIS which Window's extended and
| resulted in Japanese Windows computers having file paths like
| "C:Y=UsersY=MyName" and escape sequences like "Y=n"
|
| All this to say, my respect for Japanese devs who work with
| encoding is top-tier.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe it's because I took an actual typing class way back in the
| dark days of actual clackity-clack type writers, but I don't get
| the dislike of shift keys. Are these people that learned to type
| from only playing games or other non-formalized learning to type?
| Kudos for you learning regardless of the method, I'm just looking
| at why I don't have the same aversion to the shift keys. I even
| use the "proper" shift key meaning I use the left shift when
| using a right hand key and vice-versa.
| wk_end wrote:
| I never learned to type "properly" and I also don't really care
| or think about modifier keys. I suspect it's one of those
| things - like coffee snobs searching for the perfect pourover
| technique, or steak snobs perfecting their reverse sear -
| wherein people take a hobby, passion, or profession of theirs
| and feel a need to hyperoptimize it.
| neilv wrote:
| One of the reasons...
|
| Back when the Internet became aware of typing injuries (RSI),
| folk wisdom was that one of the causes was the multiple
| simultaneous key presses, because of how people often
| contorted their hands to do it.
|
| I made various changes, and now, decades later, I can type
| all day and night, without discomfort (much to the chagrin of
| HN).
|
| (Kudos to people who limit yourself to one modifier at a
| time, and who use the alternate hand for it. It's still more
| repetitive motion, but at least you're not going against the
| folk wisdom about contorting hands.)
| akira2501 wrote:
| Entirely anecdotal point here, but I learned to type in 6th
| grade, at a time when manual typewriters where more
| prevalent than computer keyboards. I've never experienced
| RSI. My hands only get tired after about 10 hours of work
| and after a full night of sleep they're entirely fine.
|
| Probably the same reason I love keyboards with "cherry
| blue" type switches in them.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Don't get a Japanese keyboard unless you want to become insane.
| neilv wrote:
| 10% of the remaining advantage of Scheme today is not needing to
| use the Shift key to type identifiers on US keyboards. Instead,
| you use minus rather than underscore, and there's no camel-case,
| and mostly no all-caps (except for syntax transformer pattern
| variables, IMHO).
|
| However, Scheme and other Lisps have the problem of parentheses
| being a shifted character on most US keyboards.
|
| For Scheme, my Emacs tweaks included letting you type the square
| brackets (unshifted on US keyboard) to get parentheses. (Or you'd
| get the correctly matching closing character, if the close-
| square-bracket key you pressed would match an open-square-
| bracket.)
| dunham wrote:
| Donald Knuth has a custom keyboard layout file for macos that
| switches [] with () and + with =.
|
| The file is at https://www-cs-
| faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/DonKeys...., linked from
| https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html
| chuckadams wrote:
| R6RS scheme lets you use square brackets equivalently to
| parentheses.
| neilv wrote:
| If you want uncomfortable pointy corners, sure.
| mgaunard wrote:
| That's an Apple Japanese keyboard.
|
| Apple messes with the standard keyboard of all layouts.
| glandium wrote:
| I guess you're being downvoted because of how you said it, but
| you're not wrong. I have a Japanese keyboard too, albeit not a
| Mac one, and the underscore needs shift (without shift, it's
| backslash, which means that yes, I don't need to use M-Y=).
| Caps lock is also under tab, and Control on the bottom left.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I briefly flirted with a Japanese keyboard just to get the extra
| keys that they have (next to the space bar which is much smaller)
| I then remapped those keys to other more useful commands.
|
| I then discovered VIA/QMK keyboards and now I have keycaps I
| can't even see on my vertically mounted split-key keyboard and
| more programmability than I know what to do with. But in 2012, a
| Japanese Keyboard was much cheaper than a Kinesis and to me the
| only option.
| omitmyname wrote:
| you can simply remap keys with karabiner-elements.pqrs.org, why
| bother with a japanese keyboard?
| koito17 wrote:
| I always buy Macbooks with JIS layout, not because underscores
| are convenient to type. It's convenient to push the kana button
| to start writing in Japanese then Ying Shu when finished. On an
| ASCII keyboard, Mac OS requires either C-<RET> or pushing the Fn
| key, both of which waste an entire second to display a modal,
| then another second to actually switch keyboard layout.
|
| I will admit, JIS layout makes writing Clojure a bit easier,
| though it also makes quoting tedious. Escaping is even more
| tedious. Push M-Y= is one option. Another option is to configure
| Mac OS to output backslash, but then you can't input Y=.
|
| When coding with an ASCII keyboard, I frequently make typos due
| to muscle memory. If you work in the US, that is another major
| disadvantage. Your work computers will have ASCII keyboards, not
| JIS keyboards.
| fragmede wrote:
| Bring your own keyboard to work and have JIS keyboards shipped
| in from overseas. Imo it's worth it to not ruin/fight muscle
| memory.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Food for thought. When I was making my own custom keyboard layout
| I resisted the additional rabbit hole of shuffling punctuation.
| The only change I did make was to put ',' above right-hand pinky
| (shifted is ':' and home-row pinky being a letter). I decided I'm
| not going to use semi-colon terminated programming languages
| anymore so it's fine to be down with the '<' key.
| wormius wrote:
| The keys I hate the most are $ % ^ & { }
|
| I think underscores are pretty painless, but maybe it's just that
| my hands being like Trumps tiny hands make it less painful? I
| never liked the idea of a short space bar, but thinking about it
| now with the comment of having a couple useful buttons does sound
| kinda nice.
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