Digraphs or Trigraphs #31
Comments
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From my understanding in the blog post series @madrabbit explains that after he truly measured how fingers behave when writing texts (which presumably included much more than just digraphs, trigraphs, etc.), there was no need to artificially add some guessed parameteres like "digraphs & trigraphs constraints with thought-out weights" as it converged automatically and "much easier/faster/better". |
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I've read all of the blog posts and think I understand how he incorporated digraphs and trigraphs in the testing to determine if the 2 or 3 letters could be easily typed in sequence, but I was wondering if any analysis was done to determine if the creation of key-pair combinations would yield any value. (ie, could we ditch z key in favor of adding a 'th' key? or more realistically set the z key on a different layer so we're penalized for using it in the few instances it's needed) |
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Oh, now I understand. I think he mentioned something about "key combinations mapped to one key" or similar in his blog posts but I might be wrong (it's already quite some time since I read them and now I have not much time searching through them). It's definitely a useful concept to explore for use in less generic environments. But as a general keyboard layout I'd guess it wouldn't score much higher than e.g. current Halmak. But don't take this as any claim - it's a guess and I'd rather saw comprehensive evidence about it (i.e. tests exactly as you're asking for). |
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Hey Zac,
Thanks for reaching out.
That's an interesting idea, and no I haven't thought about that. I don't
have instruments to tell you how it would work out in real life, but I
think you're right on the principle there, many bigrams are more frequent
than some symbols and there could be merit to that.
Japanese alphabet/keyboards behave in much the same way, and they look
really compact and handy. Afaik some middle eastern languages are the same.
I don't know if I would want type English like that, since I write software
as well and it might in my way. But some people with motor issues asked to
develop a layout useful for one hand operation, or for situations where a
person misses some fingers. And in that context, I think there could be
some merit to the idea.
Either way, thanks for sharing!
PS: in a similar vein, what I thought about recently is that a lot of
punctuation symbols are actually more frequent than some letters,
especially if one writes code for a living. So moving some letters way up
into the numbers row to make space for punctuation doesn't seem like such a
crazy idea
…--
NN
On Fri, 3 Sep 2021, 4:58 am dumblob, ***@***.***> wrote:
Oh, now I understand. I think he mentioned something about "key
combinations mapped to one key" or similar in his blog posts but I might be
wrong (it's already quite some time since I read them and now I have not
much time searching through them).
It's definitely a useful concept to explore for use in less generic
environments. But as a general keyboard layout I'd guess it wouldn't score
much higher than e.g. current Halmak. But don't take this as any claim -
it's a guess and I'd rather saw comprehensive evidence about it (i.e. tests
exactly as you're asking for).
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I like your numbers row idea too... that's a really good point. I also think you were onto something with the multi-layout idea. Effectively, our use of 'Shift' is giving us access to a second layer and conveniently there are two shift buttons on every keyboard... why do they do the same thing? (rhetorical) The Japanese keyboards is a great example and subconsciously, that's probably where the di/trigraph key idea came from. Japanese is a bit different though because the 'syllables'/letters that make up words also make up the alphabet (hiragana and katakana at least). English would be a tougher sell since those kinds of letter pairs aren't naturally identified the same way. "in theory" could be broken down to [in] [space] [the] [or] [y] (reducing the keypresses from 9 chars to 5) if common di/trigraphs had keys but most people wouldn't be trained to identify the di/trigraphs present in a word like they are in Japan (because it's also the alphabet). I'm sure the learning curve for English would be steep since we'd also have to train ourselves to identify common digraphs in the words themselves; I just wonder if the efficiency return is worth the effort. There's a lot of interesting tech opportunities out there to help people with physical constraints and agreed, this could be one of those... or it could be fun way to type faster than everyone else and confound anyone trying to type on my keyboard... muahah! Thank you both for responding and humoring my interest. PS: I know it's unsolicited but if you have the opportunity to use a split spacebar... I highly recommend it. My left spacebar is programmed as a backspace and shift+[left spacebar] is a delete key. That small, intuitive, change prevents me from taking my right hand off home row every time I need to backspace (often) and the delete functionality saves me from arrowing over. This also frees up 2 buttons on the keyboard since neither of those had a shift+ functionality assigned to them in the first place. I wish this was more of a standard option but it's worth it if you can find one. |
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I actually got into mechanical keyboards in the last few years and ended up
with a minidox setup
It's a super minimalistic keyboard, so I'm running 5 separate layers:
letters/numbers/symbols/navigation/functions. And also I'm using home row
mods on top of that.
My brain was exploding the first few months from all the layers, but once
you get used to it, getting back to a normal full size keyboards with just
shifts feels really weird and inefficient
Turned out that you don't even need 40% of keys on a keyboard, go figure
…--
NN
On Fri, 3 Sep 2021, 9:30 am ZacKnaus, ***@***.***> wrote:
I like your numbers row idea too... that's a really good point. I also
think you were onto something with the multi-layout idea. Effectively, our
use of 'Shift' is giving us access to a second layer and conveniently there
are two shift buttons on every keyboard... why do they do the same thing?
(rhetorical)
The Japanese keyboards is a great example and subconsciously, that's
probably where the di/trigraph key idea came from. Japanese is a bit
different though because the 'syllables'/letters that make up words also
make up the alphabet (hiragana and katakana at least). English would be a
tougher sell since those kinds of letter pairs aren't naturally identified
the same way. "in theory" could be broken down to [in] [space] [the] [or]
[y] (reducing the keypresses from 9 chars to 5) if common di/trigraphs had
keys but most people wouldn't be trained to identify the di/trigraphs
present in a word like they are in Japan (because it's also the alphabet).
I'm sure the learning curve for English would be steep since we'd also have
to train ourselves to identify common digraphs in the words themselves; I
just wonder if the efficiency return is worth the effort.
There's a lot of interesting tech opportunities out there to help people
with physical constraints and agreed, this could be one of those... or it
could be fun way to type faster than everyone else and confound anyone
trying to type on my keyboard... muahah!
Thank you both for responding and humoring my interest.
PS: I know it's unsolicited but if you have the opportunity to use a split
spacebar... I highly recommend it. My left spacebar is programmed as a
backspace and shift+[left spacebar] is a delete key. That small, intuitive,
change prevents me from taking my right hand off home row every time I need
to backspace (often) and the delete functionality saves me from arrowing
over. This also frees up 2 buttons on the keyboard since neither of those
had a shift+ functionality assigned to them in the first place. I wish this
was more of a standard option but it's worth it if you can find one.
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Oh nice. The programmable mech keyboards they're coming out with these days are slick. Minidox looks legit but I got an ergodox a while back and can't get used to it to save my life. I'm holding onto it making incremental improvements with the hopes that eye-tracking technology will improve so I can use the extra thumb keys as left/right mouse click buttons to eliminate my mouse completely. (sidebar-do you realize that if you reach for the mouse once a minute and it takes you 1 second to get there and 1 second to get back to home row, you're effectively spending about 69 hours a year moving your hand back and forth like a DJ... and that's assuming you're only using a computer for 40hrs/wk). My day-to-day keyboard is also mech but I haven't played with layers too much yet (mostly because of the brain explosions you mentioned). It's arbitrary but 3 layers seems like the most I could keep track of... did you immediately jump to 5? If I'm going to make the jump to learn another layout, I'd like it to be nearly my last. It occurred to me last night... you did the heavy lifting to determine the amount of effort to reach each key... I could leverage that research as a key weighting and then use some nyt text + source code to rank the most common letters/digraphs/trigraphs and then map them to a multi-layer keyboard based on their ranking and your key reach weighting (here: http://nikolay.rocks/2016-02-26-beyond-rockstar ). My hybrid likely won't be statistically perfect and I'll have to find a way to consider the extra effort to toggle the additional layer key but it'd probably be a decent start. |
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A guy at Google did this research on the topic a few years ago. It seems
pretty solid. You might find it interesting
http://norvig.com/mayzner.html
…--
NN
On Fri, 3 Sep 2021, 11:32 pm ZacKnaus, ***@***.***> wrote:
Oh nice. The programmable mech keyboards they're coming out with these
days are slick. Minidox looks legit but I got an ergodox a while back and
can't get used to it to save my life. I'm holding onto it making
incremental improvements with the hopes that eye-tracking technology will
improve so I can use the extra thumb keys as left/right mouse click buttons
to eliminate my mouse completely. (sidebar-do you realize that if you reach
for the mouse once a minute and it takes you 1 second to get there and 1
second to get back to home row, you're effectively spending about 69 hours
a year moving your hand back and forth like a DJ... and that's assuming
you're only using a computer for 40hrs/wk).
My day-to-day keyboard is also mech but I haven't played with layers too
much yet (mostly because of the brain explosions you mentioned). It's
arbitrary but 3 layers seems like the most I could keep track of... did you
immediately jump to 5? If I'm going to make the jump to learn another
layout, I'd like it to be nearly my last.
It occurred to me last night... you did the heavy lifting to determine the
amount of effort to reach each key... I could leverage that research as a
key weighting and then use some nyt text + source code to rank the most
common letters/digraphs/trigraphs and then map them to a multi-layer
keyboard based on their ranking and your key reach weighting (here:
http://nikolay.rocks/2016-02-26-beyond-rockstar ). My hybrid likely won't
be statistically perfect and I'll have to find a way to consider the extra
effort to toggle the additional layer key but it'd probably be a decent
start.
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I'm very late to the discussion, but do you still use your Minidox? I have an Atreus and Halmak looks really interesting, but I saw in issue #33 that it might not be the best fit. I especially find the ? and G keys are very hard to press, and seem better suited for other punctuation (which isn't the case with a regular keyboard). If you use Halmak with it, do you find that it's still good enough, or have you made changes? Even with those flaws, it still seems like a great layout and I'm really starting to notice and hate Dvorak's center column, so I may make the switch regardless. |
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Hey there,
Yup, I’m still using Halmak on a minidox. Works great for me :)
Although, I have kind of evolved it, I use home row mods and separate layouts for punctuation, so I don’t really use the middle columns that much. Typing “G” is initially a bit harder on an ortho keyboard, because on a skewed keyboard it’s closer, but that’s just ortho, I got used to it in a few months, now I don’t feel it at all
NN
…On 18 Jun 2022, 18:34 +1000, 4P5 ***@***.***>, wrote:
> I actually got into mechanical keyboards in the last few years and ended up with a minidox setup It's a super minimalistic keyboard, so I'm running 5 separate layers: letters/numbers/symbols/navigation/functions. And also I'm using home row mods on top of that. My brain was exploding the first few months from all the layers, but once you get used to it, getting back to a normal full size keyboards with just shifts feels really weird and inefficient Turned out that you don't even need 40% of keys on a keyboard, go figure
I'm very late to the discussion, but do you still use your Minidox? I have an Atreus and Halmak looks really interesting, but I saw in issue #33 that it might not be the best fit. I especially find the ? and G keys are very hard to press, and seem better suited for other punctuation (which isn't the case with a regular keyboard).
If you use Halmak with it, do you find that it's still good enough, or have you made changes? Even with those flaws, it still seems like a great layout and I'm really starting to notice and hate Dvorak's center column, so I may make the switch regardless.
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First off, very cool project. Thanks for putting it out there.
Was any consideration given to the potential of using digraphs or trigraphs to make typing more efficient? Digraphs like 'th', 'he', 'in', and 're' may all be more useful than a 'z' or a 'q' key. I'm curious if your AI considered this and/or if it could be implemented as a mixed-layer solution.
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