Re: (CHAT/OT) Left-handed '6'

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 03:37:18PM +0200, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:
>
> > But I have never heard of Dvorak. Sounds inconvenient, though ;)
>
> Dvorak is another key-mapping (IIRC DVORAK is named after the first six letters
> that appear in the first row, like QWERTY,
Nope, nothing that ugly :)  It's named after the inventor.  Here's the
layout:

        12345 67890[]\
        ',.py fgcrl/=
        aoeui dhtns-
        ;qjkx bmwvz

(Space left where touch-typing divides the hands)

It puts the vowels on the left-hand home row, and all the really rare (in
English) letters on the other left-hand rows.  The most common consonants
are on the right-hand home row (except r is more frequent than d, in the
most common frequency listing ETAOIN SHRDLU, but it's up on the top row).

More importantly, for English, the most common key *combinations* are
typed with an easy roll of the hand: 'nt' is the 4th+3rd fingers of the
right hand, 'th' the 3rd+2nd, 'st' the 5th+3rd (all rolling inward, which
feels very natural).  Vowel dipthongs also roll inward, with 'i' and 'u'
being on the index finger and 'e' on the middle finger, and the rarely-
second vowels 'a' and 'o' being on the 5th and 4th fingers of the left
hand.

        ',.py fgcrl
        aoeui dhtns
        ;qjkx bmwvz

th:            <-
nt:             <-
nd:           <---
st:             <--
sh:            <---
sn:              <-

au:     --->
ai:     ---->
ou:      -->
ae:     -->
oi:      --->

The only problem is that most programming languages and key combinations
in command-line editors have evolved to use QWERTY, so common programming
keys like [] or ; are inconvenient in Dvorak, and the direction keys in
vi no longer form a diamond :)

> and is meant IIRC to help touch-
> typing to be faster). But like QWERTY it is based on the relative frequency of
> letters in the English written language.
Only better :)

Also, it provides interesting off-by-one errors.  If I get my right hand
off by one (more common than my left, for some reason; maybe because of
all the far-right keys that I have to lift my hand to reach?), my name
Amanda can become either Abatia or Awasha :)

Amanda
New merechi text discovered:
http://mercury.quandary.org/~langs/merechi/grammar.2002.html

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